The Ongoing Impact of Covid-19 on Education
The closure of schools due to the Covid-19 pandemic has left a profound mark on education worldwide. As countries battled with closures of varying durations, the impact of Covid-19 on student learning became increasingly evident. Recent data released by the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) have illuminated the extent of the damage and its potential economic consequences.
According to the results, which include data from 175 million students across seventy-two countries, the extent of losses varied significantly from country to country, depending on how long schools were closed. Countries with shorter periods of closure experienced relatively minor losses, while those with the longest closures observed a year’s worth of learning loss. The data suggest that, in general, immigrant students suffered greater losses, except in countries with longer closures, where the learning loss among immigrant students was similar to that of native students.
PISA data also revealed differences in learning losses among students at different performance levels. In countries with average-duration school closures of about 5.5 months, learning losses were similar for low-, average-, and high-achieving students. However, in countries with shorter closures, the highest-achieving students experienced minimal setbacks, with the majority of learning losses incurred by average- and low-achieving students. In countries with longer closures, the greatest learning losses were suffered by high-achieving students.
The findings from PISA are consistent with data from the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS). Data from fifty-five countries, covering over 1 million students from assessment rounds in 2001, 2006, 2011, 2016, and 2021, showed that in countries with relatively longer school closures, student achievement in schools that closed for more than eight weeks was 34 points lower than expected, equivalent to more than a year of schooling. Learning losses were greater in countries with closures longer than average, with lower-achieving students experiencing significantly larger educational losses than their peers. In contrast, countries like Sweden, where schools were not closed during the pandemic, as well as Denmark, Singapore, and a few other East Asian countries that experienced only short-term closures and took measures to maximize the effectiveness of online education, saw little to no learning loss.