Abadía Alvarado LK, Gómez Soler SC, Cifuentes González J. Gone with the pandemic: How did Covid-19 affect the academic performance of Colombian students?
Int J Educ Dev 2023;
100:102783. [PMID:
37123870 PMCID:
PMC10121134 DOI:
10.1016/j.ijedudev.2023.102783]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/07/2021] [Revised: 02/16/2023] [Accepted: 04/13/2023] [Indexed: 05/03/2023]
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.
Collapse