Teachers and the Covid 19 pandemic – Identifying individual and school factors that predict successful professional adaptation (TeaCop)

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Uta Klusmann; Professorin Dr. Mareike Kunter; Professorin Dr. Thamar Voss
• Subject Area: General and Domain-Specific Teaching and Learning
• Term: from 2021 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 470251387

Teachers have a special responsibility during the Covid19 pandemic. With school closures in March 2020, they have had to abruptly adapt to unprecedented forms of distance learning and support their students' learning in the home environment. Surveys with students, parents, and teachers alike show a wide range of how well teachers managed to cope with these challenges in terms of their instructional performance and well-being. However, there are currently hardly any studies available that examine factors that can explain these differences between teachers. Furthermore, existing studies on teachers' behaviors during the pandemic are cross-sectional surveys, almost exclusively examine the quantity of learning opportunities provided by teachers. In contrast, little is known about the quality of the teachers' instructional behaviors.Therefore, the TeaCop study will use longitudinal data first to describe how teachers adapt to the pandemic-related challenges, considering their well-being and the quality of their instruction. Second, we will explore which individual and contextual factors explain differences in successful adaptation. We will make use of a currently ongoing longitudinal study, the DFG-funded study COACTIV-ExpeRt. In the longitudinal study, more than 800 mathematics (future) teachers were investigated during their induction phase and beyond (T1 to T3, 2007 to 2011) regarding their professional competence, their general cognitive abilities, their personality, and their well-being. In 2019 the participants were investigated again with around ten years of teaching experience (T4). The TeaCop study will be scheduled for the summer/fall of 2021. It includes an online teacher and school survey. With the (a) teacher survey, the quality of teachers' instructional activities during the pandemic will be measured using teacher self-assessments and evaluations of samples of the teachers' learning materials during distance learning. The evaluation will be based on the well-established basic dimensions of instructional quality: the potential for cognitive activation, the provision of learning support, and organizational support. In addition, we will investigate teachers' occupational well-being. For the (b) school survey, teachers will be asked to recruit up to 10 of their colleagues to collect school-level data on important school characteristics. Through this wealth of personal and context-related data from the participants before and during the pandemic situation, it is possible to describe changes in teachers' professional experience and behavior during the pandemic and identify personal and context-related conditions for successful adaptation. Thus, the study can make an important contribution to understanding how teachers successfully adapt to the challenging situation of the pandemic. This is particularly important to prevent the risk of increasing educational inequity during a pandemic.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dirk Richter, Ph.D.