Riassunto analitico
The Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted the educational world as we knew it, affecting every level of education, from primary to university students. Prolonged interruptions in learning have been associated with poor performances at school, leading to education gaps and low levels of human capital creation, affecting the ability of a country to grow. This study aims to understand the determinants of schooling performance and educational attainment in OECD countries, taking into account the recent pandemic. Specifically, I investigate the size of the impact of several variables’ groups on two critical aspects in education: test scores form the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the number of children out of school. To test the hypothesis that school closures in OECD countries are associated to negative performances in children’s cognitive skills, I built a database comprising data from thirty-seven countries, from year 2000 to 2017, and seventeen control variables belonging to four categories: Covid-19 pandemic, socio-economic, technological and institutional. To test for the correlates of schooling performance and educational attainment, I run regressions with OLS and GLS specifications. The regressions main results both support and contradict my working hypothesis. Specifically, the strictness of the lockdowns is positively correlated to the number of children out of school and to PISA test scores. The other variables’ groups showed relevant results in the same direction as expected by the literature. Overall, results suggest that the impact of Covid-19 lockdowns on education in OECD countries will be ambiguous. Hence, in order to increase the chances of mitigating the negative impacts of the long periods of school closures just experienced by children worldwide, it would be best to put more effort in implementing a better institutional framework, invest on technologies’ availability and improve the socio-economic wellbeing of families because, according to our results, these are the variables with the highest impacts on education.
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Abstract
The Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted the educational world as we knew it, affecting every level of education, from primary to university students. Prolonged interruptions in learning have been associated with poor performances at school, leading to education gaps and low levels of human capital creation, affecting the ability of a country to grow. This study aims to understand the determinants of schooling performance and educational attainment in OECD countries, taking into account the recent pandemic. Specifically, I investigate the size of the impact of several variables’ groups on two critical aspects in education: test scores form the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the number of children out of school. To test the hypothesis that school closures in OECD countries are associated to negative performances in children’s cognitive skills, I built a database comprising data from thirty-seven countries, from year 2000 to 2017, and seventeen control variables belonging to four categories: Covid-19 pandemic, socio-economic, technological and institutional. To test for the correlates of schooling performance and educational attainment, I run regressions with OLS and GLS specifications. The regressions main results both support and contradict my working hypothesis. Specifically, the strictness of the lockdowns is positively correlated to the number of children out of school and to PISA test scores. The other variables’ groups showed relevant results in the same direction as expected by the literature. Overall, results suggest that the impact of Covid-19 lockdowns on education in OECD countries will be ambiguous. Hence, in order to increase the chances of mitigating the negative impacts of the long periods of school closures just experienced by children worldwide, it would be best to put more effort in implementing a better institutional framework, invest on technologies’ availability and improve the socio-economic wellbeing of families because, according to our results, these are the variables with the highest impacts on education.
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