Report
22 March 2023
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic led to an unprecedented level of change in how higher education providers organised their teaching and assessment activity. Almost overnight, staff had to adapt previous face-to-face teaching approaches to online contexts, and assessment approaches also changed, again relying more on forms of assessment that could be taken reliably at distance.
These changes happened immediately at the onset of the pandemic late in the 2019-20 academic year, but also over a longer period, changing the way modules were taught in 2020-21.
The aim of this research was to understand how these immediate and subsequent changes to teaching and assessment approaches affected outcomes for students, specifically whether they had a detrimental effect on disadvantaged students.
The research used existing historical data from a single higher education provider to investigate the relationships between measures of disadvantage, changes to teaching and assessment, and academic performance (attainment and progression).
Overall, the research found that students from disadvantaged backgrounds have lower attainment and lower rates of progression than students from other backgrounds. There is some evidence that the attainment gap due to disadvantage widened significantly between 2018-19 (when teaching/assessment was normal) and 2020-21 (when teaching/assessment was online). This widening of the attainment gap may have resulted in up to 20% of students from disadvantaged backgrounds achieving a lower end-of-year classification.
Given the small sample size and that data was from only three courses, it is difficult to draw firm conclusions from this dataset, however the analyses provide a framework for other higher education providers to follow when examining their own institutional data.