The Long-Term Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic among Slovak Higher Education Students

Abstract

Since the pandemic outbreak, governments have introduced measures to decrease the spread of COVID-19. One of the measures widely implemented has been linked to social distancing. As a result of these measures, many activities had to be canceled or moved to a remote environment. This has also affected the education sector, where educators and students had to quickly adapt to online teaching and learning. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, in many schools, distance learning was very limited, or it did not exist at all. Even though it was mainly elementary and secondary schools that were adversely affected, many higher education institutions were also taken by surprise by the need to switch abruptly from onsite to online mode. The long-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic remains to be studied and assessed in depth, but after two years since the first wave of the pandemic, lessons from the transition to online learning can be drawn. In this article, we analyze the impact of student specific characteristics and the perceived efficiency of online education on students’ knowledge acquired compared to their pre-pandemic performance. We find that perceived effectiveness of online education, size of the city of residence, and whether a student is a foreign or domestic student have a positive and statistically significant impact on students’ performance, compared to their pre-pandemic results.