Learning loss due to school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic
By Per Engzell, Arun Frey, Mark D. Verhagen. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021
1,271 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Significance School closures have been a common tool in the battle against COVID-19. Yet, their costs and benefits remain insufficiently known. We use a natural experiment that occurred as national examinations in The Netherlands took place before and after lockdown to evaluate the impact of school closures on students’ learning. The Netherlands is interesting as a “best-case” scenario, with a short lockdown, equitable school funding, and world-leading rates of broadband access. Despite favorable conditions, we find that students made little or no progress while learning from home. Learning loss was most pronounced among students from disadvantaged homes. Suspension of face-to-face instruction in schools during the COVID-19 pandemic has led to concerns about consequences for students’ learning. So far, data to study this question have been limited. Here we evaluate the effect of school closures on primary school performance using exceptionally rich data from The Netherlands (n ≈ 350,000). We use the fact that national examinations took place before and after lockdown and compare progress during this period to the same period in the 3 previous years. The Netherlands underwent only a relatively short lockdown (8 wk) and features an equitable system of school funding and the world’s highest rate of broadband access. Still, our results reveal a learning loss of about 3 percentile points or 0.08 standard deviations. The effect is equivalent to one-fifth of a school year, the same period that schools remained closed. Losses are up to 60% larger among students from less-educated homes, confirming worries about the uneven toll of the pandemic on children and families. Investigating mechanisms, we find that most of the effect reflects the cumulative impact of knowledge learned rather than transitory influences on the day of testing. Results remain robust when balancing on the estimated propensity of treatment and using maximum-entropy weights or with fixed-effects specifications that compare students within the same school and family. The findings imply that students made little or no progress while learning from home and suggest losses even larger in countries with weaker infrastructure or longer school closures.
Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Education, Modeling and Simulation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/781e756ff91c81a2754825183c42251f72a5e890
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Citations in the corpus
- The Long-Term Distributional and Welfare Effects of Covid-19 School Closures (2020, background): “First results seem to indicate that online learning might on average not be effective at all for elementary school children (Engzell et al., 2021).”
- COVID-19 learning losses: early grade reading in South Africa (2021, background): “As Engzell et al (2021) points out, these findings surely represent a “best case” scenario from countries with highly effective schooling systems and relatively short school closure durations (between 8 and 9 weeks).”
- Learning loss during Covid-19: An early systematic review (2021, background): “Engzell, Frey, and Verhagen (2021) find that, overall, Grade 4–7 students in the Netherlands have encountered an average 0.08 SD learning loss in math, spelling, and reading.”