Terminó la pandemia: efectos del COVID-19 en el rendimiento académico en Colombia

Autoras: Luz Karime Abadía, Silvia Gómez y Juanita Cifuentes

Moderadores: Jorge Iván Bula Escobar, Director del Centro de Investigaciones para el Desarrollo (CID) de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia (UNAL) y Leonardo Urrea profesor de la FCE UNAL

Fecha: Septiembre 22 de 2021

La pandemia de COVID-19 es un choque exógeno sin precedentes que ha puesto a prueba la capacidad de respuesta de los sistemas educativos de todo el mundo. La literatura internacional sobre el efecto del cierre de escuelas en el rendimiento escolar es aún limitada. Esta investigación busca llenar este vacío mediante el estudio del caso colombiano utilizando la información de los exámenes Saber 11 para los años 2017 a 2020. Utilizando secciones transversales repetidas y un modelo de efectos fijos de escuela y tiempo, estimamos el efecto de la pandemia en el desempeño de estudiantes de secundaria cerca de la graduación, encontrando un efecto negativo. Los resultados son robustos a la presencia de sesgo de selección.

Gone with the pandemic: effects of COVID-19 on academic performance in Colombia

The Covid-19 pandemic is an unprecedented exogenous shock that has tested the responsiveness of education systems around the world. The international literature that has quantified the effect of school closings due to Covid-19 on school performance is still limited. This literature suggests that the closure of schools reduced the academic performance of the 2020 cohort compared to the previous ones. To date there is only one study by Lichand et al. 2021 that quantifies this effect for a Latin American country even though the countries of this region have been the most affected by the pandemic. This research seeks to fill this gap in the literature by studying the Colombian case using the information available in the databases of the Saber11 examination for the years 2017 to 2020. Using a pool of cross-sections and a school and time fixed effects model, we estimate the effect of the pandemic on the performance of graduating high school students, finding a negative effect that is in line with the existing literature. The significant reduction in the number of students taking the Saber11 exam in 2020, could raise suspicions about a possible selection bias in these results. We also used inverse probability weighting regressions and trimming by specific quantiles of the test score distribution to control for this possible source of bias. The results show that the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on Saber11 exam overall scores remains negative and statistically significant.