Education systems across Europe continue to grapple with a persistent challenge: students who fall behind in foundational skills often never catch up, leading to disengagement, dropout, and diminished life opportunities. This challenge is particularly acute for disadvantaged Roma students, many of whom face overlapping barriers of poverty, limited access to digital tools, and educational histories marked by interruption or exclusion. A recent study led by researchers at Corvinus University of Budapest offers a compelling case for how online learning, when thoughtfully designed and implemented, can help close these gaps and restore students’ confidence in their own ability to learn.
The research, conducted by Krisztina Megyeri, Zsófia Koós, and Brigitta Szilágyi, examined an online catch-up programme launched at the Ámbédkar School in Hungary, an institution that primarily serves disadvantaged Roma students, including young people who had dropped out of or come close to dropping out of mainstream education. The findings, published in the journal PROSPECTS, provide practical insights for educators, policymakers, and anyone invested in education empowerment through digital tools.
Why Foundational Knowledge Gaps Matter More Than Age-Appropriate Content
One of the most important takeaways from the Corvinus University study is a deceptively simple observation: many struggling students do not lack the capacity to learn age-appropriate material. Instead, they are missing foundational skills from earlier grades. A ninth-grade student who cannot confidently perform basic numeracy operations will struggle with algebra, geometry, and data interpretation, regardless of how well the current curriculum is taught.
As Krisztina Megyeri, a researcher at Corvinus University, explained: “You cannot simply skip over missing foundations. If students are given tasks suited to their own level and receive immediate feedback, they can experience a sense of achievement, which can later become the basis for their motivation to learn.”
This insight has broad implications. Traditional classroom instruction typically moves at a fixed pace dictated by the curriculum and the majority of the class. Students whose knowledge is fragmented, whether due to interrupted schooling, frequent moves, or under-resourced schools, often find themselves perpetually addressing symptoms rather than causes. Online learning platforms, by contrast, can diagnose precisely where each student’s understanding breaks down and generate targeted practice at that level.
How the Online Catch-Up Programme Worked
The programme began in September 2021 and focused primarily on developing ninth-grade students’ mathematics and IT skills. Students practised using the EduBase online learning platform, which offered three features that proved essential to the programme’s success:
- Parameterised exercises: For each topic, the system generated new variations of problems, meaning students could not simply memorise answers. Each attempt presented a fresh version of the same underlying concept.
- Immediate feedback: Students learned right away whether their approach was correct, allowing them to adjust their thinking in real time rather than waiting days for graded homework to return.
- Unlimited repeated attempts: Students could try tasks as many times as needed, removing the fear of failure that often paralyses learners who have experienced repeated academic setbacks.
Forty students began the school year in the ninth-grade class examined, and researchers analysed the results of 27 students in greater detail. On average, these students completed 31 online tests across 10 subject areas and achieved an average score of 62 per cent. Interestingly, the data revealed gender-based patterns: girls tried a wider range of topics and performed better on average, while boys completed more tests and spent more time practising. These differences suggest that engagement strategies may need to account for how different students approach independent online learning.
Digital Skills: The Hidden Prerequisite for Online Learning
Perhaps the most surprising finding from the study concerned digital literacy itself. Although the programme launched in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, when online learning became a global norm, many participating students had never developed even basic digital skills. The reason was straightforward: many lacked a stable internet connection or a computer at home. Remote schooling during the pandemic had, for these students, been largely out of reach.
This meant the programme had to begin by teaching students how to use online tools at all before it could address mathematics or IT content. Brigitta Szilágyi, a researcher at Corvinus University and the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME), described the process: “The programme had a difficult start, as the students had significant gaps in their ability to use online tools. After addressing these, we carried out a comprehensive assessment to determine how far back we needed to go with each student, and this became the starting point for their development.”
For educators and institutions planning digital education initiatives, this finding is critical. Access to devices and connectivity is not the same as digital competence. Any programme that assumes students already know how to navigate an online platform risks losing its most vulnerable participants before instruction even begins.
The Psychology of Success: Why Small Wins Drive Motivation
One of the most striking elements of the programme was what happened after students reached their required proficiency levels. Several students continued practising basic numeracy topics voluntarily, even after completing them. Szilágyi noted that scoring above 80 per cent on a test “had been a very rare experience in their lives, so they wanted to experience that sense of success again and again.”
This observation carries a profound lesson about education empowerment. For students who have spent years receiving low grades and implicit messages about their academic inadequacy, the experience of genuine achievement can be transformative in itself. The online platform’s design, which allowed students to progress at their own pace and only advance after mastering each level, created a structure in which success was attainable and repeatable.
The implications extend well beyond mathematics instruction. When designing any educational intervention for students who have experienced academic failure, the goal should not simply be to deliver content again. It should be to engineer early, authentic experiences of competence that rebuild the learner’s identity as someone capable of succeeding.
From Scepticism to Peer Collaboration: Changing Classroom Culture
The programme’s effects rippled beyond individual achievement. Subject teachers were initially sceptical about whether online practice would benefit their students, but positive results converted them into supporters. Following the successes in mathematics, teachers of other subjects requested similar catch-up and skills-development programmes for their own courses, suggesting that demonstrated results are the most persuasive form of advocacy for educational innovation.
The school’s management also played a crucial role by creating a supportive environment from the outset. Institutional backing, it turns out, is not a nice-to-have but a structural precondition for programmes like this to succeed.
Most notably, students began communicating with one another more frequently. When one student understood a task, they would start explaining it to the others, a form of peer collaboration that had previously been uncommon in lessons. This shift from isolated struggle to collaborative problem-solving represents one of the most valuable outcomes of the entire initiative. Peer-to-peer learning reinforces the explaining student’s understanding, builds social cohesion, and normalises the idea that asking for and offering help is part of learning rather than a sign of weakness.
Key Lessons for Educators and Institutions
The Corvinus University research offers several actionable principles for anyone designing catch-up or skills-development programmes for disadvantaged students:
- Diagnose before teaching. A comprehensive assessment to identify each student’s actual starting point is essential. Teaching age-appropriate content to students with foundational gaps simply widens the divide.
- Allow mastery-based progression. Students should advance only after successfully completing the previous level, but retain the freedom to return to earlier topics for additional practice whenever they wish.
- Build in immediate feedback and fresh problem variants. Parameterised exercises prevent rote memorisation and turn each attempt into genuine problem-solving practice.
- Do not assume digital competence. Budget time and instruction for teaching basic platform navigation and digital skills, especially for students from households without reliable technology access.
- Measure success beyond percentages. Learning to use an online platform, experiencing a high test score for the first time, and beginning to help classmates are all meaningful outcomes that standard metrics may miss.
- Secure institutional support early. The enthusiastic backing of school management was a decisive factor in this programme’s implementation and durability.
Redefining What It Means to Catch Up
The study’s central message is that helping students catch up requires more than re-teaching the same material. It requires identifying the right starting point and creating a learning environment in which students can practise independently, at a pace that feels safe for them. An online platform can ensure that students do not feel ashamed of falling behind and can instead approach their learning gaps as manageable problems they are fully capable of working through.
For disadvantaged Roma students in Hungary and for marginalised learners elsewhere, this reframing matters enormously. When educational gaps are treated as personal failures rather than structural outcomes, students internalise shame and disengage. When those same gaps are treated as diagnosable, addressable problems with clear pathways to progress, students engage, persist, and, as the Ámbédkar School experience shows, even begin to teach one another.
Digital education is not a panacea, and this research does not claim otherwise. The programme required careful design, committed researchers, supportive school leadership, and patient teachers willing to revise their scepticism. But it demonstrates convincingly that with the right structure, online learning can do far more than deliver content. It can restore agency, rebuild motivation, and open doors that years of traditional instruction had left closed.
For institutions, educators, and policymakers working toward education empowerment, the message is clear: meet students where they actually are, give them the tools to progress from that point, and celebrate the achievements, however small they may appear, that mark the beginning of a renewed relationship with learning.
