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      Potential effects of COVID-19 school closures on foundational skills and Country responses for mitigating learning loss

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          Abstract

          This article investigates to what extent disrupted schooling and dropout affects children’s acquisition of foundational skills prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using household survey data from thirteen low- and lower-middle-income countries, we find that missing or dropping out of school is associated with lower reading and numeracy outcomes. Drawing on global surveys conducted during the pandemic, we find that countries’ remote learning responses are often inadequate to keep all children learning, avoid dropout, and mitigate the learning losses our findings predict, particularly for marginalized children and those at the pre-primary level.

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          Most cited references31

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          Educational gains of in‐person vs. distance learning in primary and secondary schools: A natural experiment during the COVID ‐19 pandemic school closures in Switzerland

          Using data from a computer‐based formative feedback system, we compare learning gains in the 8 weeks of school closures related to the COVID‐19 pandemic in Switzerland with learning gains in the 8 weeks before these school closures. The school performance in mathematics and language of N = 28,685 pupils is modelled in second‐order piecewise latent growth models with strict measurement invariance for the two periods under investigation. While secondary school pupils remain largely unaffected by the school closures in terms of learning gains, for primary school pupils learning slows down and at the same time interindividual variance in learning gains increases. Distance learning arrangements seem an effective means to substitute for in‐person learning, at least in an emergency situation, but not all pupils benefit to the same degree.
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            Early Childhood Stimulation Benefits Adult Competence and Reduces Violent Behavior

            OBJECTIVE: An estimated 178 million children younger than 5 years in developing countries experience linear growth retardation and are unlikely to attain their developmental potential. We aimed to evaluate adult benefits from early childhood stimulation and/or nutritional supplementation in growth-retarded children. METHODS: In Kingston, Jamaica, 129 growth-retarded children aged 9 to 24 months took part in a 2-year trial of nutritional supplementation (1 kg milk-based formula per week) and/or psychosocial stimulation (weekly play sessions to improve mother-child interaction). We assessed IQ, educational attainment, and behavior at 22 years old in 105 participants. We used multivariate regressions, weighted to adjust for loss to follow-up, to determine treatment benefits. RESULTS: We found no significant benefits from supplementation. Participants who received stimulation reported less involvement in fights (odds ratio: 0.36 [95% confidence interval (CI) 0.12–1.06]) and in serious violent behavior (odds ratio: 0.33 [95% CI: 0.11–0.93]) than did participants with no stimulation. They also had higher adult IQ (coefficient: 6.3 [95% CI: 2.2–10.4]), higher educational attainment (achievement, grade level attained, and secondary examinations), better general knowledge, and fewer symptoms of depression and social inhibition. CONCLUSIONS: Early psychosocial intervention had wide-ranging benefits in adulthood that are likely to facilitate functioning in everyday life. The reductions in violent behavior are extremely important given the high levels of violence in many developing countries. The study provides critical evidence that early intervention can lead to gains in adult functioning.
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              Compensating for academic loss: Online learning and student performance during the COVID-19 pandemic

              The COVID-19 pandemic has led to widespread school shutdowns, with many continuing distance education via online-learning platforms. We here estimate the causal effects of online education on student exam performance using administrative data from Chinese Middle Schools. Taking a difference-in-differences approach, we find that receiving online education during the COVID-19 lockdown improved student academic results by 0.22 of a standard deviation, relative to pupils without learning support from their school. Not all online education was equal: students who were given recorded online lessons from external higher-quality teachers had higher exam scores than those whose lessons were recorded by teachers from their own school. The educational benefits of distance learning were the same for rural and urban students, but the exam performance of students who used a computer for online education was better than those who used a smartphone. Last, while everyone except the very-best students performed better with online learning, it was low achievers who benefited from teacher quality.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Int J Educ Dev
                Int J Educ Dev
                International Journal of Educational Development
                Published by Elsevier Ltd.
                0738-0593
                0738-0593
                11 October 2021
                November 2021
                11 October 2021
                : 87
                : 102434
                Affiliations
                [a ]UNICEF Office of Research – Innocenti, Education, Italy
                [b ]UNICEF, Data, Analytics, Division of Data, Analytics, Planning and Monitoring, United States
                [c ]UNICEF, Programme Division, Education, United States
                [d ]UNESCO-IIEP Dakar, Senegal
                Author notes
                [* ]Corresponding author.
                Article
                S0738-0593(21)00087-0 102434
                10.1016/j.ijedudev.2021.102434
                8504478
                34658500
                02040f40-8e4d-42d6-8775-e9933bf66389
                © 2021 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

                Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.

                History
                : 11 December 2020
                : 29 April 2021
                : 5 May 2021
                Categories
                Article

                covid-19,learning loss,foundational skills,remote learning,educational effectiveness

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