Page 390 - RUICHSS 2023 Proceeding

University of Ruhuna ISSN: 2706-0063
Matara, Sri Lanka

The Effects of Past School Closure on Education

The Education Endowment Foundation (2020) indicates that any gap in
schooling, even routinely scheduled holidays, can cause a significant learning

loss. Slade et al. (2017) state that in Malawi, transitional breaks from Grade

One to Two, and Grade Two to Three lead to an average reduction of 0.4
standard deviations on four different measures of reading skills.

According to Baker (2011), during a 20-day school closure due to teachers’
strikes in Ontario, Canada, a learning loss occurred in the Mathematics test

scores, equal to half (0.5) of a standard deviation. Wills (2019) discovered

that, in South Africa, students’ performance in subjects taught by a teacher
who did not engage in strikes was approximately 0.1 standard deviations

higher than the subjects taught by a teacher who striked. According to studies
examining the effects of closing schools due to severe weather and natural

catastrophes, there are significant negative effects on learning due to school
closure.

In the United States, Marcotte and Hemelt (2008) discovered that for each day

schools were closed due to snow, the performance of students in Reading and
Mathematics decreased by 0.5%; in a year with five consecutive days of

snowfall, it lessened by approximately 3%. Similarly, Andrabi et al. (2020)
state that the school closure of nearly 3.5 months in Pakistan after an

earthquake caused a learning loss that is equivalent to 1.5 school grades.

There were prolonged school closures during 2013–2014 due to the Ebola
outbreak in West Africa which caused a severe effect on education. This

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