The impact
of Coronavirus on education
·
The
global lockdown of education institutions is going to cause major (and likely
·
Unequal)
interruption in students’ learning;
·
Disruptions
in internal assessments; and the
·
Cancellation
of public assessments for qualifications or their replacement by an inferior
alternative
·
Home schooling is not
only a massive shock to parents’ productivity, but also to children’s social
life and learning.
·
Teaching is moving
online, on an untested and unprecedented scale.
·
Student assessments
are also moving online, with a lot of trial and error and uncertainty for
everyone.
·
Many assessments have
simply been cancelled.
·
short period of missed
school will have consequences for skill growth
Importantly, these interruptions will not
just be a short-term issue, but can also have long-term consequences for the
affected cohorts and are likely to increase inequality.
This column discusses
what can be done to mitigate these negative impacts.
Impacts on education: Schools
Going to school is the best public
policy tool available to raise skills. While school time can be fun and can
raise social skills and social awareness, from an economic point of view the
primary point of being in school is that it increases a child’s ability. Even a
relatively short time in school does this; even a relatively short period of
missed school will have consequences for skill growth. But can we estimate how
much the COVID-19 interruption will affect learning? Not very precisely, as we
are in a new world; but we can use other studies to get an order of magnitude.
Impacts on education: Families
Perhaps to the disappointment of some,
children have not generally been sent home to play. The idea is that they
continue their education at home, in the hope of not missing out too
much.
Families are central
to education and are widely agreed to provide major inputs into a child’s
learning
The current
global-scale expansion in home schooling might at first thought be seen quite
positively, as likely to be effective. But typically, this role is seen as a
complement to the input from school. Parents supplement a child’s maths
learning by practising counting or highlighting simple maths problems in
everyday life; or they illuminate history lessons with trips to important
monuments or museums. Being the prime driver of learning, even in conjunction
with online materials, is a different question; and while many parents round
the world do successfully school their children at home, this seems unlikely to
generalise over the whole population. So while global home schooling will
surely produce some inspirational moments, some angry moments, some fun moments
and some frustrated moments, it seems very unlikely that it will on average
replace the learning lost from school.
Assessments
The closure of schools, colleges and
universities not only interrupts the teaching for students around the world;
the closure also coincides with a key assessment period and many exams have
been postponed or cancelled.
Internal assessments
are perhaps thought to be less important and many have been simply cancelled.
But their point is to give information about the child’s progress for families
and teachers. The loss of this information delays the recognition of both high
potential and learning difficulties and can have harmful long-term consequences
for the child.
Lockdown Consequences
Importantly, the lockdown of institutions not only affects internal assessments. In the country, for example, all exams for the main public qualifications have been cancelled for the entire cohort.
Depending on the duration of the
lockdown, we will likely observe similar actions around the world.
One potential alternative for the
cancelled assessments is to use ‘predicted grades’, but Murphy and Wyness
(2020) show that these are often inaccurate, and that among high achieving
students, the predicted grades for those from disadvantaged backgrounds are
lower than those from more advantaged backgrounds.
Another solution is to replace blind
exams with teacher assessments. Evidence from various settings show systematic
deviations between unbind and blind examinations, where the direction of the
bias typically depends on whether the child belongs to a group that usually
performs well.
For example, if girls usually perform
better in a subject, an unblind evaluation of a boy’s performance is likely to
be downward biased. Because such assessments are used as a key qualification to
enter higher education, the move to unblind subjective assessments can have
potential long-term consequences for the equality of opportunity.
It
is also possible that some students’ careers might benefit from the interruptions.
For example, in Norway it has been decided that all 10th grade students will be
awarded a high-school degree.
And Maurin and McNally (2008) show that the 1968 abandoning of the normal
examination procedures in France (following the student riots) led to positive
long-term labour market consequences for the affected cohort.
In higher education
many universities and colleges are replacing traditional exams with online
assessment tools. This is a new area for both teachers and students, and
assessments will likely have larger measurement error than usual. Research
shows that employers use educational credentials such as degree classifications
and grade point averages to sort applicants
The increase in the
noise of the applicants’ signals will therefore potentially reduce the matching
efficiency for new graduates on the labour market, who might experience slower
earnings growth and higher job separation rates. This is costly both to the
individual and also to society as a whole (Fredriksson et al. 2018).
Graduates
The careers of this
year’s university graduates may be severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
They have experienced major teaching interruptions in the final part of their
studies, they are experiencing major interruptions in their assessments, and
finally they are likely to graduate at the beginning of a major global
recession. Evidence suggests that poor market conditions at labour market entry
cause workers to accept lower paid jobs, and that this has permanent effects
for the careers of some. Oreopoulos et al. (2012) show that graduates from
programmes with high predicted earnings can compensate for their poor starting
point through both within- and across-firm earnings gains, but graduates from
other programmes have been found to experience permanent earnings losses from
graduating in a recession.
Solutions?
The global lockdown of education
institutions is going to cause major (and likely unequal) interruption in
students’ learning; disruptions in internal assessments; and the cancellation
of public assessments for qualifications or their replacement by an inferior
alternative.
What can be done to mitigate these negative
impacts?
Schools need resources
to rebuild the loss in learning, once they open again. How these resources are
used, and how to target the children who were especially hard hit, is an open
question. Given the evidence of the importance of assessments for learning,
schools should also consider postponing rather than skipping internal
assessments. For new graduates, policies should support their entry to the
labour market to avoid longer unemployment periods.
Thank
you
Author:
Dhruv
Dev Dubey
BE,
MBA-Human Resource
Business
Head -3D India Group, Bangalore
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