Effects of COVID-19 on Student Learning : Assessing Learning Losses Using Adaptive Technology

Overview & Synopsis

This paper quantifies learning losses between 2020 and 2022 in the Dominican Republic, an upper-middle-income country. The paper uses data from a sample of ninth-grade students who benefited from computer adaptive learning software during this period. This study is among a few to measure actual losses among secondary school students, and it is the first to use detailed data on students’ mastery of individual math topics to do so. The findings show no evidence of learning losses in our analysis sample. However, the paper documents concerningly low learning levels, with the average student mastering only 45 percent of pre-requisite topics for their grade. These results should be interpreted with caution, as they are based on a select sample of urban schools and may not fully reflect broader educational trends across the country.