Does online education magnify educational inequalities? Evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic

Yue Sun, Can Tang and Zhong Zhao

China Economic Review, 2024, vol. 88, issue C

Abstract: Taking the closure of all primary and secondary schools in China at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic as a quasi-natural experiment, this paper examines the impact of online education on student academic performance and the role of family socioeconomic status (SES) in the K-12 online environment. We employ a difference-in-differences approach and find that online learning has a positive effect on the performance of previous high-achieving students and a negative effect on low-achieving students. Further, employing the difference-in-difference-in-differences method, we find that students from high-SES families improve their GPA by 0.464 points after distance learning relative to disadvantaged students, i.e., the gap between low and high SES performance widens by 16.7 %, and this effect is more pronounced among students in primary schools and in provinces where online education lasts longer. The mechanism analysis shows that high-SES families help their children make academic progress in online education by developing their children's academic locus of control, providing access to information and communication technology, and increasing study time.

Keywords: Online education; Socioeconomic status; Educational inequality; Academic locus of control (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:chieco:v:88:y:2024:i:c:s1043951x24001937

DOI: 10.1016/j.chieco.2024.102304

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