Battisti Michele, Maggio Giuseppe
Department of Law, University of Palermo, Piazza Bologni 8, 90134 Palermo, Italy.
ICEA, Canada.
Eur Econ Rev. 2023 May;154:104405. doi: 10.1016/j.euroecorev.2023.104405. Epub 2023 Mar 8.
Governments have implemented school closures and online learning as one of the main tools to reduce the spread of Covid-19. Despite the potential benefits in terms of containment of virus diffusion, the educational costs of these policies may be dramatic. This work identifies these costs, expressed as decrease in test scores, for the whole universe of Italian students attending the 5th, 8th and 13th grade of the school cycle during the 2021/22 school year. The analysis is based on a difference-in-difference model in relative time, where the control group is the closest generation before the Covid-19 pandemic. Results suggest a national average loss between 1.8-4.0% in Mathematics and Italian test scores. After collecting the precise number of school closure days for the universe of students in Sicily, this work also estimates that the average days of closure decrease the test score by 2.4%. In this context, parents appear to have a partial compensatory effect, but only when holding higher levels of education and when their children are attending low and middle schools. This is likely explained by the lower relevance of parental inputs and higher reliance on other inputs, such as peers, for the higher grades. Finally, the effects are also heterogeneous across class size, parents' country of birth and job conditions, pointing towards potential growing inequalities driven by the lack of frontal teaching.
各国政府已实施学校停课和在线学习，作为减少新冠病毒传播的主要手段之一。尽管这些政策在遏制病毒传播方面有潜在益处，但这些政策的教育成本可能很高。这项研究确定了这些成本，以考试成绩下降来表示，针对的是2021/22学年意大利学校5年级、8年级和13年级的全体学生。该分析基于相对时间的双重差分模型，对照组是新冠疫情大流行之前最接近的一代人。结果显示，数学和意大利语考试成绩的全国平均损失在1.8%-4.0%之间。在收集了西西里岛全体学生的确切停课天数后，这项研究还估计，平均停课天数会使考试成绩下降2.4%。在这种情况下，家长似乎有一定的补偿作用，但只有在家长受教育程度较高且孩子就读于中小学时才会如此。这可能是因为对于高年级学生来说，家长投入的相关性较低，而对同龄人等其他投入的依赖较高。最后，这些影响在班级规模、家长的出生国和工作条件方面也存在差异，这表明缺乏面授教学可能会导致不平等加剧。
