Simulating the Potential Impacts of COVID-19 School Closures on Schooling and Learning Outcomes: A Set of Global Estimates
By João Pedro Azevedo, Amer Hasan, Diana Goldemberg, K. Geven, S. Iqbal. The World Bank Research Observer, 2020
652 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract This paper presents simulations of the potential effect of COVID-19-related school closures on schooling and learning outcomes. It considers four scenarios—varying in both the duration of school closures and the effectiveness of any mitigation strategies being deployed by governments. Using data on 174 countries, the analysis finds that the global level of schooling and learning will fall substantially. School closures could result in a loss of between 0.3 and 1.1 years of schooling adjusted for quality, bringing down the effective years of basic schooling that students achieve during their lifetime from 7.8 years to between 6.7 and 7.5 years. Close to 11 million students from primary up to secondary education could drop out due to the income shock of the pandemic alone. Exclusion and inequality will likely be exacerbated if already marginalized and vulnerable groups, such as girls, ethnic minorities, and persons with disabilities, are more adversely affected by school closures. Students from the current cohort could, on average, face a reduction of $366 to $1,776 in yearly earnings. In present value terms, this amounts to between $6,680 and $32,397 dollars in lost earnings over a typical student's lifetime. Globally, a school shutdown of 5 months could generate learning losses that have a present value of $10 trillion. By this measure, the world could stand to lose as much as 16 percent of the investments that governments make in the basic education of this cohort of students. In the pessimistic and very pessimistic scenarios, cumulative losses could add up to between $16 and $20 trillion in present value terms. Unless drastic remedial action is taken, the world could face a substantial setback in achieving the goal of halving the percentage of learning poor by 2030.
Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Education, Modeling and Simulation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d674afc917a8601daa76a73db757e79bb91bce35
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Citations in the corpus
- Building back better to avert a learning catastrophe: Estimating learning loss from COVID-19 school shutdowns in Africa and facilitating short-term and long-term learning recovery (2021, background): “Our overall modeling approach and assumptions began with more than 100 recent early grade reading data sets from countries around the globe, which we then pared down to subSaharan Africa-only countries for the majority of this paper.”
- Learning loss due to school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic (2021, neutral): “In their projections of learning loss due to the pandemic, the World Bank assumes a yearly progress of 0.40 SD (46).”
- Learning from the COVID-19 home-schooling experience: Listening to pupils, parents/carers and teachers (2020, background): “The World Bank has emphasised the need for ‘building back better’ strategies, which include developing ‘more equitable and resilient post-COVID education systems that enable children to learn continuously both in schools and at home’ (Azevedo et al., 2020).”
- COVID-19 learning losses: early grade reading in South Africa (2021, methodology): “Azevedo et al (2020) simulate scenarios for varying lengths of school closures and effectiveness of remote learning based on assumptions from the World Banks Learning Adjusted Year of Schooling (LAYS) data for 157 countries together with data from the Programme for International Student Assessment…”
- Learning loss during Covid-19: An early systematic review (2021, background): “While many researchers have established learning-loss prediction models (Azevedo et al., 2021), formal research and documentation of the actual impact that Covid-19 has had on student learning progress is just beginning to emerge.”