Publication:
The Longer Students Were Out of School, the Less They Learned

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2023-04-26
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2023-04-26
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COVID-19 led to school closures and emergency remote learning systems. It is feared that students learned less when they were remote. This paper analyzes school closures during the pandemic using a unique data base. The determinants of the duration of school closures estimates were used to instrument school closures – stringency of lockdown and vaccination – and causally estimate the impact of duration on learning. It is estimated that for every week that schools were closed, learning levels declined by almost 1 percent of a standard deviation. This means that a 20 week closure, for example, would reduce learning outcomes by 0.20 standard deviation, almost one year of schooling.
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Patrinos, Harry Anthony. 2023. The Longer Students Were Out of School, the Less They Learned. Policy Research Working Papers; 10420. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/39741 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.
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