The impact of Covid-19 physical school closure on student performance in OECD countries: a meta-analysis

In this report, we conduct a new meta-analysis of papers examining the impact of Covid-19 school related closure on student performance. While we focus only on OECD countries, the present meta-analysis includes, to the best of our knowledge, a larger number of studies (i.e., 55), effect sizes (i.e., 400) and countries (i.e., 21) than previous similar studies. Our results confirm that Covid-19 had, on average, an adverse effect on learning. While the size of the overall learning loss is estimated to be between 0.11 and 0.17 standard deviations of student achievement, learning losses are found to be smaller for pupils in OECD EU countries than for their peers in OECD non-EU countries. The periods of physical school closure were shorter in OECD EU countries than in OECD non-EU countries and this may provide a possible explanation for our finding. Additionally, our study shows that, overall, students seem to have fallen behind in their learning more in the later stages of the pandemic compared with the earlier stages. This finding is at variance with the outcome of earlier meta-analyses concluding that students did not lose any additional ground but failed to rebound. Our result is driven by the inclusion of recent studies showing that pandemic-related learning deficits have accelerated over time. Consequently, our findings suggest that particular attention should continue to be paid towards ensuring that students are able to catch up on what they have missed while schools have been closed.