Gone with the pandemic: How did Covid-19 affect the academic performance of Colombian students?

Luz Karime Abadía Alvarado, Silvia Gomez Soler and Juanita Cifuentes González

International Journal of Educational Development, 2023, vol. 100, issue C

Abstract: The Covid-19 pandemic is an unprecedented shock that has tested the responsiveness of education systems around the world. The international literature that has studied the Covid-19 pandemic and school performance is still limited. Colombia presents an interesting scenario for the analysis due to the prolonged school closures and long lockdowns it experienced in 2020, and the availability of a rich dataset on the results of a high school exit examination (Saber11) that was administered even during the pandemic. Using this data, we estimate whether the COVID-19 pandemic is associated to lower levels of performance amongst graduating high school students using a school and time fixed effects model, finding a negative relation. Due to the significant reduction in the number of students taking the national standardized high school exit exam in 2020, we use inverse probability weighting (IPW) regressions to control for possible selection bias. The results of these regressions show that the Covid-19 pandemic has a negative and statistically significant relation with the scores obtained by students on the Saber11 exam. These results are relevant because they provide evidence to motivate the design of public policies that mitigate the side effects of the pandemic on educational outcomes.

Keywords: Covid-19; Learning losses; Standardized tests; Sample selection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 I24 I29 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0738059323000597
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:injoed:v:100:y:2023:i:c:s0738059323000597

DOI: 10.1016/j.ijedudev.2023.102783

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Educational Development is currently edited by Stephen P Heyneman

More articles in International Journal of Educational Development from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().