Abstract: This paper estimates the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on student’s achievements in literacy and mathematics, focusing on Italian students in upper secondary school who experienced the pandemic for one and a half year. Taking advantage of longitudinal data from national standardised tests for the entire population of students - over 300,000 individuals per cohort - and controlling for initial learning outcomes, we compare the achievements of two cohorts of students, an untreated cohort and a treated one who completed upper secondary school in 2021. Then, to address the anchoring issue, we evaluate changing learning inequalities by implementing a novel empirical strategy.
The pandemic had a substantial negative impact on students’ performance in mathematics and in literacy (-0.39 standard deviations and -0.41 s.d., respectively), larger in scientific lyceums and technical tracks. While no difference emerges by the household socio-economic background, learning losses are greater for boys than for girls and for students in the North compared to students in the South of Italy. Notably, students with a low level of prior skills lost more compared to students with high levels of prior skills.
