Will Brehm  1:14
Dirk Hastedt and Sabine Meinck, welcome to FreshEd.

Dirk Hastedt  1:17
Thank you, Will. Nice to be here.

Sabine Meinck  1:18
Hello, Will. Thanks for the invitation.

Will Brehm  1:20
So, the two of you have been working with a group of different organizations on something called the Responses to Educational Disruption Survey. What is that survey?

Dirk Hastedt  1:29
Well, in the Response to Educational Disruption Survey, or we call it just REDS, we introduced the study in mid of 2020 when the COVID 19 pandemic hit the world and we saw huge disruptions of educational systems also around the world. So, we thought that’s a unique and important opportunity to look at what’s been going on in the countries. How has education continued and what has not continued? And what were the different measures that countries have taken in order to continue education and cater for children, teachers and others?

Will Brehm  2:05
What countries were involved in this REDS survey?

Sabine Meinck  2:09
Perhaps I can right away take this question. I think REDS is very special in many aspects. And the countries participating was one of the specialties of the survey. So, because we have had not so many countries, there are people who know large scale assessments, there can be really many countries participating. We have more than 50 countries in other studies. But here we had just 11. But it was a very, very great variety of countries both regional but also in terms of the developmental status of the countries. So, we covered four different continents. We had countries from Africa, this was Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Kenya and Rwanda. We had from Asia: India and Uzbekistan. We had from Europe: The Russian Federation, also switching to Asia, of course, Denmark and Slovenia. In the Arab region, we had the United Arab Emirates. And then we had Uruguay from Latin America. So, just listening to these country names, you probably can get a feeling that we cover a huge variety of different educational systems, situations, and also situations that were very different in terms of the pandemic, I think.

Will Brehm  3:18
A lot of those countries, I feel kind of ashamed. I don’t even know what happened with the pandemic in some of those countries and some of the particulars. So, it is an interesting group of countries. And now within these different countries who was actually surveyed?

Sabine Meinck  3:30
What’s happened is -this is actually a really good question. This was exactly the same that we thought. I mean during the course of the pandemic, in the news, what you have seen a lot was what was happening in your own country. And then perhaps sometimes the news would also cover something that is happening in countries like the US, or the big countries, or the neighboring countries that also affected the situation in your own country. So, what we thought was we wanted to learn more about what’s happening, actually, within the other countries. And because we were reading so much about what’s happening about the virus, how the vaccines were developed. So, what was happening in the hospitals, that we heard the nurses and doctors were really overworked. But what was hardly ever in the news was what’s happening in the education system, even though I think the students, the teachers, the principals were perhaps the one people most affected by the pandemic. So, we thought, okay, let’s give them a voice. And this is why we surveyed principals, teachers, and students. And this is really on a large scale. So, we surveyed more than 21,000 students, 15,000 teachers and 1,500 school principals in the 11 different countries.

Will Brehm  4:46
Wow, that is quite a lot. Is it statistically representative of each of those countries, that sample?

Dirk Hastedt  4:51
Yeah, it absolutely is representative. And I think that’s also quite unique for that survey. That we used the high standards that we have on all IEA studies that we are having representative samples from the countries. And whenever that was not the case, or could not be achieved, actually, we always mark that also in the report. And you can see also on this list of countries, it is very diverse. And one of the reasons why we also had only 11 countries is that we launched the study in mid-2020 and we didn’t know how long the COVID-19 situation would last. So, we thought we have to be very, very quick. Usually, international surveys like that take four or five years from initialization to collecting data and reporting. For this REDS one, it is very special that we ran on a very, very short schedule. We initiated it mid-2020 and started collecting data already at the end of 2020, up to mid-21. And having a report available beginning of ‘22. So, this is very unusual. So, yes, we applied all the high standards that we’re having but we had to be very quick and also sometimes compromise. And we saw that also, not all countries we’re able to get to all the schools. So, then we had to give some notifications of a sample size that we would like to achieve was not achieved. Because the situation was of course, very, very difficult.

Will Brehm  6:15
I’d actually like to go into some of these challenges here because it sounds like to do this quickly across national survey, as you said, is something unusual for the IEA to do, as well as probably other big organizations that do these big cross-national surveys. But also, in a time of a public health emergency. And you have to actually go and survey all of these different people. I would imagine that also posed some pretty serious challenges. So, can you talk me through what were some of these challenges and how you overcame them?

Dirk Hastedt  6:45
I can talk maybe on the country level. And what we saw there is we initiated a study and approached, at that time, UNESCO and asked them if they want to join forces and conduct the surveys. So, we used the UNESCO network, as well as our network, to ask countries to participate. And as I said, we got 11 countries, and we’re very happy that we got them. But of course, many countries said it’s simply impossible to that timeline. And also because of the pandemic hitting us, how can we approach schools? How can we get and survey students or teachers if they are not in school? So, that was really challenging. And one reason why we could also be very quick is because we used our computer study ICILS, which was conducted on just before. And we used the instruments and based also the instruments, the survey instruments, the questionnaires on the ICILS instrument because we thought that it would be natural because our experience was that countries were using a lot of digital media. So, digital media would be important and to see how they were used and what are the challenges? How were schools equipped? How could teachers make use of it? What were the challenges of students? That’s what we did. So, we based it on that. But during the course of study, we also saw that there were also a lot of countries using what we might call low-tech solutions like radio broadcasts or TV broadcasts and to continue teaching something that we in the beginning had not envisioned that much. So, we also had to modify and change some of the instruments to cater for these countries which were in different positions.

Sabine Meinck  8:16
Yeah. I actually want to reiterate what you said earlier because I think this is really important. I mean, REDS is the one -and I think it will remain the only study that is operating on a large scale. So, we had countries from all over the world. Plus, we tried to adhere to the very highest standards and all the IEA studies have. We had to compromise in some places, but this is all in the report. So, we do tell people and the readers where we had some challenges and how we did overcome them. But in general terms, I would say this is a real big strength of the survey. So, we do have a large representative sample from many countries. And we have large samples, for sure, for all the 11 countries. So, I think that is really important. Yeah. And of course, you know, we have very high standards, for example, for participation rates. And this is because most of the time, you don’t know what are the non-respondents, what are they like? And do they differ systematically, in some ways from those who want to participate? And in REDS, we were really afraid that there was a direct relation between the questions that we asked and how the respondents versus the non-respondents would react. So, just to give an example, we ask about connectivity. So, many teachers tried to provide online lessons like in a virtual meeting or virtual classroom. So, we didn’t do that before, right. So, now in some countries, we knew that basically all the students had the devices at home to participate in these sessions. But well, not all the students had that opportunity. Be it missing devices, be it missing a space within the home to participate in such a lesson in a quiet manner. So, we were afraid that the people who would not respond could actually not be reached because of that. If this would happen, then you have a bias in your results. And so, we had to be especially careful about that. So, this was certainly a challenge. And we felt we have to be very transparent about that. And this is why we have one actually long chapter. It’s actually one of the first chapters that is just on the methodology and all these challenges that we had to face. And of course, in a specific school, you schedule the session. In many countries, they tried to do the administering of the survey questionnaires within the school. So, all the students were in the schools. And then you had scheduled the session, and then there was a COVID-19 case in the school and they had to close. So, it was really, really difficult what we heard from the national research coordinators, what they told us, how difficult it was actually to implement this study because of that situation.

Will Brehm  10:58
I would imagine it would be a nightmare in a way to sort of coordinate across these 11 countries during a pandemic. I mean, there’s ethical issues, there’s public health issues. As you said, there’s issues of the non-respondents, so statistical issues. So, I mean, it’s really quite a difficult methodology. So, I would encourage people to go out and read that methodology chapter because, you know, how do you do a survey in times of emergencies is quite an interesting question. Incidentally, is this data that has been collected by REDS, is it publicly available for anyone to use and manipulate for their own research?

Sabine Meinck  11:30
Thank you for asking this question because this is really at our hearts. All the data from IEA studies are publicly available, and the REDS data is publicly available as well. Everyone can just go on our website and download this data. The one challenge again, here is, as you probably know, large scale assessment data, they have some specifics around statistical properties. So, it’s not that easy to analyze it. And this is why we actually offer workshops. And we do actually offer a workshop in the beginning of May. Anyone who’s listening to this podcast is very much invited to join the workshop. It’s going to be in the beginning of May. It’s stretched over, I think, two weeks because it’s virtual. So that the people do not have to sit like, a long day in a virtual meeting. I think that this is not the most efficient way to do it. So, it’s stretched, but the people will learn what was asked. So, they will learn what kind of questionnaires did we have? What kind of questions were asked? How does the data look? What are the statistical properties? So, how do you analyze that data? So, we will really show them with the IDB analyzer -this is a statistical tool provided by the IEA that can actually handle large scale assessment data, including REDS. So, they will be shown how to do that. And also, be shown what kind of research questions, how do you ask them? How can you answer them? What kind of statistical methods would you apply in terms of answering them? And it would be just great. You know, we have these treasures of data, but we don’t have the time and the resources to really dig into it. So, please do use this data. This would be great.

Will Brehm  13:09
Why don’t we turn to some of the sort of findings from this study, this survey? I guess, to start, all of these different countries, as you said, they all come from different regions and different sort of development statuses. Did they all experience some form of school closure during the pandemic? And if so, were they different in any way?

Dirk Hastedt  13:31
That’s a good one, Will. Because I think one of the key findings that we had in REDS is that the situation was different significantly between countries but also within-country. We saw that there were long school closures. And for some countries, these long school closures meant that there were no schooling provided at all. Whereas in other situations, like, for example, in the United Arab Emirates, they closed the schools for the longest time. But on the other hand, they continued teaching by using digital methods. So, they approached the students and they switched on computers and that’s what they’ve done there. So, we see differences between countries. But what we also saw, and that’s very striking, and also worrying is that we saw huge differences within countries. Also, Sabine has said before that we saw differences in availability of computers. If you move to digital teaching, it means that the students have to have a digital equipment. And that was not a given for all the students in all the countries. And we have seen that the students who already performed lower before the pandemic are probably the ones that were more difficult to reach also during the pandemic. That’s what the principals and teachers told us. So, there is the threat that there could be a gap widening because the students who were equipped better and did better before have easier access to the continuation of teaching. Whereas the students that were left a little behind before had also more challenges in continuing learning because they had no computers available. But also one thing that we sometimes forget, it is more than a computer that you need. You also need a quiet place. And if you’re in a small flat with four kids or whatever, then that’s a big challenge. And the students could not, well, learn as good as before, or the quiet situation that they  might have had in the school. And we also heard about students who had to take care of their siblings because they also were at home. So, it was a big challenge for everyone. And we saw that different students were affected differently in the different countries.

Sabine Meinck  15:36
That’s really important. But let’s face it, I think the biggest differences we really saw between countries, and I think this is what we have seen in terms of who gets vaccines. So, I think the richer countries, actually they have secured themselves with the doses. But we found a reflection in that also in education systems. I think the countries with the lowest HDI had months of school closures where nothing has happened. So, the students did not do any schooling. I think the gap between the richer countries and the not so rich countries really widened during the pandemic in several terms, and I think this is really important. But of course, what Dirk says is also important. We also see these differences, the widening gap within countries. And perhaps we will talk about that also a little later. Even if you offer the opportunity to learn in a digital session online, then that is only useful if you offer the opportunity but perhaps some students cannot take it. It probably doesn’t need a survey to think about who that is, but we have now evidence and the evidence is very clear.

Will Brehm  15:39
It is so interesting, because, you know, I think one of the common refrains during the pandemic has been that the pre-existing inequality has just been furthered in a way during and because of the pandemic. And it sounds like you’re saying that has existed across countries, when we look at rich and poor countries, but also within each individual country, we see this widening gap that is probably based on pre-existing forms of inequality that were just exacerbated because of the pandemic. And I can just imagine, four children in a small flat. It would be a nightmare. I mean, do you have to have four computers? I mean, that’s a really large expense for a lot of families, I would imagine. So, one of the other things that often comes out when we think about the pandemic is issues around well-being. You know, this has been a public health emergency, it’s been traumatic, it’s been stressful for everyone to different extents. But now, like you said earlier, you have evidence on some of this stuff. So, what do we know about the well-being of students and teachers and principals in these 11 countries?

Sabine Meinck  17:44
Perhaps I’ll start with the students because I have three children myself. Luckily, they are grown up, so I didn’t have this big challenge to cater for them and also do my job at the same time. So, basically, what we found from the questionnaires, the students were anxious about what’s happening in the world. And perhaps we tended to forget about it. But perhaps even more important, they really missed meeting their classmates and friends. And of course, I mean, in some countries, they could not even leave the flat for quite an amount of time. So, this was a situation that, of course, they didn’t feel well about that. And I think this is something we should not forget. But for the teachers, I know that teachers are very much at the heart of Dirk, perhaps he wants to respond on that.

Dirk Hastedt  18:29
I think on one hand, we can say that there was a huge emphasis on the well-being. So, also, teachers, but also school principals took it very seriously. And that’s also what they all reported,  put the well-being of students and others as one of the top priorities. But that also means that their workloads increased significantly. For those who continue teaching, it was also, for them, a big job to continue teaching, but also to cater to students who are anxious. So, they put a lot of emphasis on that. And that, of course, stressed out teachers as well. And teachers were also scared that if they go to schools, where there are students, that they might also catch COVID 19. So, they were also scared. And we also heard from the principals that it was a challenge for them and emphasis on them to care about the well-being of students but also the well-being of the teachers. We could hear, also, from the teachers that they said they have felt that the principals were supporting them and took care of their well-being as well. And I think that’s another important aspect -the colleagues. So, I think it’s very important also in these times of crisis, something that we learned that if a good situation in schools where the principals are taking care of the students and teachers but also the teachers work together as a team to take care of each other, take care of the students. And teachers, in some cases, also respond that they took the job of more or less social workers also in helping families. For example, getting unemployment money or something like that. Getting support. So, a lot of teachers went well beyond their normal task, and I think we should really appreciate what teachers have done in these difficult times.

Will Brehm  20:03
And that brings up a really important issue around workload because I think teachers did go above and beyond. And they started doing multiple things. Like you said, not only being a teacher and having to learn how to teach online or use all these new methods, and also, do it in a situation that was constantly changing. You didn’t know when you were going to have to be called back home or when you were going to actually be able to be in your classroom again. What rules govern the classroom? Did you have to wear a mask? Do people have to be vaccinated? You know, social distancing. It was a totally new world for teachers. They also, on top of this, were in many ways acting as social workers, as sort of community carers that families relied on schools for so many things beyond just the learning that takes place in the classroom. And teachers ended up being on the frontline in those situations. So, in many ways, the teacher workload seems to have massively increased, which of course, then would impact well-being. So, across these 11 countries, what evidence do we have about teacher workload and perceptions of teacher workload?

Sabine Meinck  21:00
Yeah, definitely. A vast majority of teachers said that their workload has increased compared to prior to the pandemic. So, that is something we clearly see. Also, a majority said that they felt more stressed by everything. You know, by the pandemic itself but also because they had to learn new methods at the same time, right away to implement them and to apply them. But what was the really good news to me, that also most of them said, they found ways to cope with it. So, in the end, they said they were able to cope with the situation. They were able to continue teaching, they were able to set priorities. Now they had to set priorities. And I just want to reiterate that most of them said the colleagues especially were helpful with them. So, I think that that is one important message that we also can have learned here. So, encouraging the networking among teachers is a very important thing. I think that is something we also knew before but here, it showed even more that this was very important. And here also the networks had to work in a different way, right. So, they could not meet within the schools. So, they had to find ways on how to communicate with their peers in a different way.

Will Brehm  22:11
Were there differences across the countries in terms of issues around workload and well-being and the idea of having that support network to help the teachers cope in this really difficult environment. Were there any differences across these countries?

Sabine Meinck  22:25
We found differences for almost everything. So, differences across countries, differences within countries. For the differences within countries, that’s something I think we really have to dig deeper into the data to find out who were these teachers who rather reported even higher workloads compared to others. We already have seen some indication. So, for example, teachers who had a family themselves. So, they perceive it even harder. Of course, you have to do the teaching, but your own kids might also be at home. And that might be even toddlers, you know. Kids that usually would attend kindergarten, for example. But I think we need to look further into that. I think we also saw some indication that teachers in schools with perhaps a little lower socio-economic intake. So, there might be some more variation in terms of the workload demand because that’s just something that I could imagine. So, for some of the students, you can offer digital learning, but you also know that, for example, special education needs students, more other vulnerable students like those from really lower socio-economic backgrounds or from migrant backgrounds that, you know, you could see in your virtual lesson that they would actually not show up. So, they had to think about okay, how do I reach those students? Do I print out materials? Do I go there? Do I try to get in contact in other ways with them?

Will Brehm  23:45
And was there variation in terms of gender? Or the age of teachers? Do we have some of this data? Like could that be something that future research begins to explore? Some of these differentiations based on gender and age and race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, etc.?

Sabine Meinck  24:01
For teachers, what we do have is age and gender. So, this data is there, but it has not been explored yet. So, it is definitely something you can dig into. And I think that might be really interesting. For the students, we already looked into that a little bit. So, what we could see is that students with a lower socio-economic background reported more often that they fear to fall more behind compared to their peers. And I found that quite interesting. So, even though students were not able to really know how much they would fall behind in general terms, they are aware that they might be somehow different to their peers with a higher socioeconomic status. So, we could see that in the data. In terms of gender, we saw some countries where female students also were more likely to report this anxiety about what is next? Is my future actually endangered because of the effects of the COVID 19 pandemic? But this was not the same in all countries. I think it was three countries where we could see a significant difference between the gender.

Dirk Hastedt  25:09
And I think one thing I’d like to add is that Sabine just said that students didn’t know how much they fall behind. And it’s actually an interesting finding that we asked the teachers, the principals, and the students if they were able to teach and learn as much as before the pandemic and principals and teachers, most decided that they were not. And the students that were more likely to say, yeah, I think we did everything. And again, you can see that, of course, the students didn’t know what they were missing, because they have the comparison. So, we had some interesting deviations of the perspectives, actually. But the principals and teachers, they were in line that although we had no achievement tests, they said that they couldn’t teach as much as before the pandemic.

Will Brehm  25:50
Principals and teachers might be thinking about the curricular content that students don’t know about, but students probably still learned quite a lot outside of school and because of the pandemic in many ways. So, I mean, that is an interesting sort of discrepancy, Dirk, that you’re bringing up. And I wonder, how does that finding sit with this notion of learning loss which we often hear these days about COVID negatively impacting the learning of children because of school closures, because of remote learning, etc? And it’s been used in many ways to push schools to open up again. To say, get students back in school to learn. I think the World Bank has been pushing this quite a lot. So, what is your finding from this survey? How does it sit with this notion of learning loss?

Dirk Hastedt  26:36
What we saw from principals and teachers, and these are the ones I think, who should know what they taught and what students have learned. Because although students might have learned outside school, also, there were some assessments done within the school. So, I think that the teachers and principals have a good grasp on what students have learned and compare that to previous ones. But again, REDS was not an assessment. It was a survey. The first real international assessment data will come out this December. Because what we also did is we had our Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), which we conducted in more than 50 countries around the world. And that actually included an assessment of grade four students reading literacy ability. And that will be the first international data on achievement of students that will be comparable with the results from previous assessments of PIRLS, which we conduct every five years. So, I’m personally really, really curious about the results of that assessment.

Will Brehm  27:31
It’s going to really add to the conversation on learning loss because I don’t think that’s going to disappear anytime soon as a concept. And you know, there’s going to be a lot written about it probably going forward.

Sabine Meinck  27:42
I really would like to add to that as well. So, even though with REDS we did not test the learning, but we do know what was taught. So, we did ask teachers, whether they changed anything in terms of the curriculum, what they taught. And we learned that actually, yes, they did change. So, they set priorities. They set priorities in terms of the core curriculum. So, that means it’s not just the lost time for teaching because schools were closed. And for some time, at least in all countries, there was no teaching. In some countries, there was a long period of no teaching, but they also decreased the breadth of teaching. So, in PIRLS, for example, we look at the reading literacy, right. So, this is really the basic skill that will affect all the other subjects, performance in other subjects. However, what we do not test in any of our assessments are subjects like music and sports for example. Teachers could not do sports lessons, for example. So, I could very well imagine that even in the core subjects like Mathematics and Science, that many of the smaller and perhaps not as much as important perceived topics were simply not taught. So, the breadth of the opportunity, we think, did decrease. I can’t imagine that the students would have made this up just by their self-encouragement or something to learn that themselves. And they actually don’t know. So, it’s not that easy to actually check whether they actually learned in these areas as much as before. So, even if we check it out with our assessments, we may not know because we do not assess, like every subject.

Will Brehm  29:17
So, looking at this survey, I know there’s a lot more to look at going forward in this survey. But what you’ve looked at thus far, has anything surprised you?

Dirk Hastedt  29:27
For me, one interesting finding was to see that all countries had so many different ways how they dealt with the situation. And I think that was very special to see. We are usually bound in our own experience and think, okay, digital teaching, this is what countries would do. But then we saw that there were other means, low-tech solutions and other solutions. And for me, it was very surprising to see these differences between the countries. And I think it is great to see not only systems but also principals and the teachers’ innovatives. They were finding solutions and continuing teaching and learning, and continuing catering for the students. I think that was very special to see the innovation that was brought forward. If you don’t have a computer, what do you do? You have to find a solution. And that’s what they did. And I think that that’s great to see.

Sabine Meinck  30:16
Yeah. First of all, I think I was surprised that this study actually happened. In the beginning, we thought we have to do something. But at the same time, we were not sure whether this can actually be achieved. So, I think we are all very proud that we actually ran the survey. It delivered very, very good data in the end. So, that was certainly a surprise. Or the other way around, I would not have been surprised if it would not have worked out. The other surprise is perhaps, there was one finding that I really wanted to have this table in the report, even though it showed almost zero variation between countries and even within countries. And that was a question. So, we also asked the teachers, what changes will persist after the pandemic? And from the ICILS study that Dirk mentioned earlier, where we looked at, for example, at attitudes of teachers towards using digital means for teaching. And from ICILS, we know that quite many teachers do not like, so much, the digital media, to use that in teaching. Not in all countries but in many. And now, in this survey, I think more than 95% of all teachers said that many of the digital tools that they have used during the pandemic, they will stay using them afterwards. So, this was for me a surprise that so many actually said, Oh, okay, now I use it and actually it turned out to be quite helpful.

Will Brehm  31:38
That’s a really great contradiction between different instruments there. And I’m sure people can write about why that might be. I guess, as a final question, based on some of what you’ve learned from REDS, what sort of policy advice can IEA begin to give countries? Thinking about the pandemic -obviously, it’s not over yet. Many countries are still navigating schooling during outbreaks of COVID 19, different waves of COVID-19. So, is there anything from REDS that we can learn for effective education systems going forward or schools?

Dirk Hastedt  32:10
One thing that we saw is that the digitization of schools was, for many countries, a driving factor. So, putting more emphasis on digitization, which means on one hand, equipping schools and teachers, students with digital devices. But beyond that, also familiarizing the students, but even more of the teachers, with the tools that are offered by digital teaching. That’s, I think, one of the driving factors. Also, in our computer study, we saw that in a lot of countries, equipment was there, software was there. But if schools were asked, what were the major obstacles, and also the teachers, students were asked, what are the major obstacles of using digital equipment, they all agreed it was the teachers who don’t feel comfortable in using this equipment, who sometime think that students know much more about it, because they are these digital natives, they know how to operate this thing. But it’s not true. That’s also what we found is yes, they can operate their mobiles but there’s more that you need. And that needs to be taught. And it needs to be taught in school. And it needs to be in the curricula of countries. There’s a lot more, I think, we all have to do in terms of digitalization of teaching. And it doesn’t mean that this will completely replace what we currently have, but it will definitely add and make our education systems less vulnerable in this difficult situation. And of course, it will help students also to be better equipped for their future.

Sabine Meinck  33:34
And by the way, we knew that already before the pandemic because from our two big studies -the TIMSS study about mathematics and science and the PIRLS study, the old cycle, they asked the teachers what type of professional development they need. And many actually said that. So, they said they need professional development in terms of operating with digital devices, or digital means for their teaching. So, we already knew that there is this need. So, I think this is a very clear message for policymakers: make available professional development for that. And the other thing that we also have seen from the data was that quite a significant amount of students said -so, we asked them roughly a year after the pandemic started. We were still not out of it, but they were already quite familiar with what was happening. So, the students said that they feel not prepared in case there will be another school closure. And this was very much varying in-between countries. But even in the countries that did a quite good job, we had still something like one out of five students who said, I’m not feeling prepared in case my school closes again. So, I think we should really use that data and find out who are the students who still feel unprepared and make sure they are prepared. Because I could very well imagine that these kinds of things happen again. So, we are living sadly in a world of crisis right now. So, we don’t know what’s going to happen next year or in the next couple of years. Also, if I’m thinking about climate change, and so on, so forth. So, there might be different reasons why we would have some further school closures. So, we should be prepared. I think that’s a very important finding.

Dirk Hastedt  35:16
And also, take care of the students about their well-being because that was very clear. We should not focus on academic achievements, but schools are like an ecological system. It’s a lot that’s in it. Even the wellbeing of students, teachers, and everyone.

Will Brehm  35:30
Well, Dirk and Sabine, thank you so much for joining FreshEd. REDS is a really fascinating survey. Lots of insights yet to come out, I think. And I would encourage a lot of listeners to join that early May workshop to learn how to analyze the data because there’s just hidden treasures, I think, that will help us understand what we live through and are currently living through in terms of education and COVID-19. So, thank you so much for joining.

Dirk Hastedt  35:57
Thank you, Will. It was a pleasure.

Sabine Meinck  35:58
Yeah. Thanks for giving us this opportunity. Thank you.

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Guest Publications/Projects

Changes in Digital Learning during a Pandemic – Findings from the ICILS Teacher Panel

History and Current State of International Student Assessment

Future Directions, Recommendations, and Potential Developments of International Large Scale Assessments (ILSA)

Use of Educational Large-Scale Assessment Data for Research on Mathematics Didactics

Mentioned Resources

Response to Educational Disruption Survey (REDS) Report

REDS 2021 Restricted Use Data

International Computer and Information Literacy Study (ICLS)

International Database (IDB) Analyzer

Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS)

TIMSS 2019 International Results in Mathematics and Science: Teachers’ Professional Development Needs

Recommended

Preparing Educators for COVID and Beyond

Modelling the Long-run Learning Impact of the COVID-19 Learning shock

A Literature Review on Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on Teaching and Learning

COVID-19 Learning Losses

Have any useful resources related to this show? Please send them to info@freshedpodcast.com