The effect of school closures on standardized test scores: Evidence under zero-COVID policies

Christian Gillitzer and Nalini Prasad

Economics of Education Review, 2024, vol. 102, issue C

Abstract: We study the effect of school closures on learning loss under Australia’s zero-COVID policies. School closures occurred together with preemptive shelter-in-place and non-essential workplace closures that successfully eliminated the spread of COVID. We exploit variation in the duration of school closures across Australian regions of 9-157 school days and student-level test score data from a national standardized test with high participation to estimate learning loss. Learning loss was substantially smaller than comparable estimates from the literature, which has almost exclusively studied COVID mitigation (rather than elimination) policy environments. Learning loss was minimal for disadvantaged socioeconomic groups.

Keywords: Student test scores; COVID-19; Pandemic; NAPLAN; Australia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H75 I12 I18 I21 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272775724000712
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecoedu:v:102:y:2024:i:c:s0272775724000712

DOI: 10.1016/j.econedurev.2024.102577

Access Statistics for this article

Economics of Education Review is currently edited by E. Cohn

More articles in Economics of Education Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().