If face-to-face lessons are not possible in the new school year due to Corona, scientists have tips. They advise creating specific groups for alternate classes – for example, according to gender.
Mannheim – Before the start of the new school year, sociologists from the University of Mannheim advise taking into account friendships among the children and young people when changing lessons.
If you want to avoid or mitigate outbreaks of infection in schools with the increasing number of corona cases, you have to intelligently divide the students. This is the result of a study by the Mannheim Center for European Social Research (MZES) and Columbia University (USA).
The study, published in the journal “The Lancet Regional Health – Europe”, analyzed contacts between 14- to 15-year-olds in 507 classes in secondary schools in England, the Netherlands, Sweden and Germany. The research team found that the random distribution of the class between two groups had the least effect against the spread of the virus.
Division by gender effective
A breakdown by gender is much more effective because school-age children and adolescents are more likely to meet members of their own gender, the researchers report. Additional contacts and thus infections between the gender groups are therefore not so common.
The division proved to be particularly effective when the social contacts indicated by the students in surveys were taken into account. Presumably because these students also meet outside of class and can thus potentially pass on infections. The likelihood of so-called superspreading – i.e. a relatively high number of infections, starting from a few infected people – can be reduced with this form of group formation.
In addition, the research team was able to show that the changing lessons of divided school classes on a weekly basis can interrupt chains of infection better than forms of teaching in which the class halves are present in the school on the same day and, for example, use different rooms at different times. Weekly change works like a kind of short quarantine, during which a burgeoning infection process can subside, according to another result of the study. dpa
