Increased Performance in Tutoring Systems During COVID-19 in Uruguay

Background: COVID-19-related school closures globally disrupted students' education, leading to declines in academic performance. However, some studies also reported performance increases within intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs). Yet, the latter evidence stems exclusively from so-called “Western” countries (e.g., Germany). Hence, whether these findings generalize to other parts of the world remains unclear. Aim: We sought to evaluate whether performance trajectories within ITSs for learning mathematics during COVID-19-related school closures were similar for students from Germany and from Uruguay—a country and cultural context that has not yet received systematic research attention in this line of research.Samples: We analyzed two longitudinal ITS datasets from Uruguay (1,357 students; 38,673 problem sets) and Germany (8,751 students; 328,948 problem sets).Methods: We applied hierarchical linear regressions to evaluate how COVID-19-related school closures affected students' performance in mathematics in both countries.Results: We observed significant performance increases during periods of COVID-19-related school closures relative to students’ performance during the same period in previous years for both samples. These performance increases were associated with increases in relative usage, with students who used the ITS relatively more during COVID-19-related school closures than before also performing better. Conclusions: Our results indicate that previous results of increased academic performance within ITS for learning mathematics during periods of COVID-19-related school closures also pertain to students from Uruguay and highlight the need to diversify research samples. Our findings corroborate the notion that ITSs are a promising and effective tool for distance learning in different regions of the world.