Delivering Education During COVID

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

COVID-19 came at a huge cost not only to the world healthcare system and economy, but to the learning of students everywhere, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Evidence suggests that students exposed to school closures for an extended period can experience significant learning losses (Andrabi, Daniels and Das 2020; Kuhfeld et al., 2020).). Current research in a range of countries is exploring how learning is being impacted, and how governments and education leaders can leverage data systems, management practices, and pedagogy to mitigate and reverse learning losses. The proposed panel will present initial findings from this on-going research, starting with a paper analysing the impact of Pakistan’s 2005 earthquake on student learning, then moving on to the impact of COVID on learning across various segments of the population in Brazil. Ways to address the risk of learning lags among students, especially among those most vulnerable, will be discussed in the presentation of the three following papers. The first of these is a paper on how the use and flow of information can be leveraged by governments across administration levels to better address the learning crisis during COVID. The results will be presented from a COVID survey run in Ethiopia. Following the presentation on information flow to improve education response plans, the panel will discuss findings from interventions rolled out in India, Philippines, and Zambia that tested out the types of pedagogies teachers and school leaders can promote to ensure sustained student motivation to learn and engagement in online lessons. The final presentations will cover 1) preliminary findings from a baseline survey in Ghana that looks at management practices at the central, district and school level and the ways in which they are able to implement government programs and digital interventions, and 2) findings from qualitative interviews in Ghana about the political economy of policy implementation and the ways in which these political economy factors affect bureaucratic behaviour.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Chair

• Karen Mundy, Toronto University

Individual Presentations

• Human Capital Accumulation and Disasters: Evidence from the Pakistan Earthquake of 2005 - Jishnu Das, Georgetown University

• Information flow in the education system in Ethiopia in the time of COVID-19 - Belay Hagos Hailu, Addis Ababa University; Tassew Woldehanna, Addis Ababa University; Pauline Rose, University of Cambridge; Louise Yorke, REAL Centre, University of Cambridge

• Do Brazil’s COVID-19 Government Response Measures Meet the WHO’s Criteria for Policy Easing. - Anna Petherick, University of Oxford

Discussant

• Prachi Srivastava, University of Western Ontario