The Impacts of Remote Learning in Secondary Education: Evidence from Brazil during the Pandemic

Guilherme Lichand,Onicio Leal Neto,Carlos Alberto Dória,João Cossi

doi:10.18235/0003344

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to document the pedagogic impacts of the remote learning strategy used by an state department of education in Brazil during the pandemic. We found that dropout risk increased by 365% under remote learning. While risk increased with local disease activity, most of it can be attributed directly to the absence of in-person classes: we estimate that dropout risk increased by no less than 247% across the State, even at the low end of the distribution of per capita Covid-19 cases. Average standardized test scores decreased by 0.32 standard deviation, as if students had only learned 27.5% of the in-person equivalent under remote learning. Learning losses did not systematically increase with local disease activity, attesting that they are in fact the outcome of remote learning, rather than a consequence of other health or economic impacts of Covid-19. Authorizing schools to partially reopen for in-person classes increased high-school students test scores by 20% relative to the control group.

Highlights

In the decades before the Covid-19 pandemic, developing countries were making strides towards universal basic education: by 2019, enrollment rates for primary education had reached over 90% in Latin America and over 75% in Sub-Saharan Africa.(1 ) Having said that, UNESCO and other international organizations described the global education outlook as a ‘learning crisis’(2 ): in developing countries like Brazil, the setting of our study, even though most children are in school, over half of 10-year-olds still cannot read age-appropriate texts(3 ), and 70% finish high school without minimum math and language skills(4 )
School closures in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic are expected to detrimentally affect such already fragile learning outcomes, and, to upset recent progress in enrollment rates.(5, 6 ) Despite widespread efforts to transition from in-person classes onto remote learning(7 –10 ), a multitude of factors combine to make the latter presumably much less effective in developing countries – limited internet access, lack of dedicate spaces to study at home, and little support from parents who often have not attended school for as long as their children have – above and beyond additional detrimental factors in the context of the pandemic, from demand for child labor to violence against children in a context of psychological distress(11 –14 )
Several studies have tried to approximate the educational impacts of remote learning during the Covid-19 pandemic.(5, 10, 27 –31 ) Most of those studies use natural variation in school recess across different geographical units or that induced by previous epidemics(32, 33 )

Summary

Introduction

In the decades before the Covid-19 pandemic, developing countries were making strides towards universal basic education: by 2019, enrollment rates for primary education had reached over 90% in Latin America and over 75% in Sub-Saharan Africa.(1 ) Having said that, UNESCO and other international organizations described the global education outlook as a ‘learning crisis’(2 ): in developing countries like Brazil, the setting of our study, even though most children are in school, over half of 10-year-olds still cannot read age-appropriate texts(3 ), and 70% finish high school without minimum math and language skills(4 ). In-person classes have not yet returned in many settings, especially in developing countries where vaccination is dragging.(22 ) Many school systems did not even conduct assessments during the period of remote classes.(23 ) Even in the few that did, inferring the effects of remote learning from differences between average test scores at in-person and remote exams would conflate differences between assessments, or differences in the profile of students whose scores are reflected by each of them Last, even if those differences could be parsed out, schools tend to close when disease activity is higher; as such, separately identifying the impacts of remote learning from those of the health or economic effects of Covid-19 is challenging. Quantifying the extent of those losses, as well as the extent to which resuming in-person classes in the pandemic could at least partially offset them, is urgent, as governments worldwide struggle evaluating the trade-offs between the health and educational risks of reopening schools, with vaccination rates still dragging

Methods

Results

Conclusion