# **1. Introduction**

During the COVID-19 pandemic, most countries closed schools for several months. School closures threaten children’s schooling as in-person teaching is replaced by distance education, since it is likely less effective and denies peer interactions (Agostinelli et al. 2022). The closures could lead to learning loss – declines in student knowledge and skills – and future earnings losses (Azevedo et al 2021; Psacharopoulos et al. 2021).

Since the closures, researchers have analyzed the impact on student learning. Most studies observed learning loss and increases in inequality where certain demographics of students experienced more significant learning loss than others. However, there are also countries that managed to limit the amount of loss, such as Denmark, through policy (Birkelund and Karlson 2022) and Sweden, by not closing schools (Hallin et al. 2022). On average, robust studies from more than 20 countries find average learning losses of 0.17 of a standard deviation (SD), equivalent to roughly a one-half year worth of learning (Patrinos et al. 2022). Most research comes from Western European and high-income countries (Engzell et al. 2021; Jack et al. 2023; Maldonado and De Witte 2022). Yet, recently more data is being published from middle income countries such as Brazil (Lichand et al. 2022), China (Clark et al. 2021), Ghana (Wolf et al. 2022) and Türkiye (Coskun and Kara 2022) – showing large losses on average.

Existing studies report declining achievement and greater educational losses for disadvantaged children. However, the impact may vary across societies, school systems, and measures adopted to contain the pandemic. For instance, schools were closed in Spain for 12 weeks, yet learning losses were much smaller (Arenas and Gortazar 2022) than in say, the Netherlands (Haelermans et al. 2021) or Germany (Ludewig et al. 2022), which closed schools for only 10 weeks. But in general, the longer the closures, the greater the losses (Patrinos 2023), everything else constant. There are also differences in the application of distance education. In some countries this was a failure (Agostinelli et al. 2022), while other countries managed to support the online education with parental resources, such as France (Thorn and Vincent-Lancrin 2021).

We contribute to this literature by leveraging a unique individual student-level dataset that assesses student learning outcomes in 2019 and 2021. As the pandemic started, the Government of Uzbekistan announced the closure of all educational institutions from March 18, 2020, for three weeks initially (UNESCO 2020). However, the closure was extended, and the education system operated on a hybrid model the entire 2020/21 academic year. By March 2021, 81 percent of school principals reported school closures for four months or longer (UNESCO 2022). With the rise in Omicron cases, the education system extended the school break in January 2022 for an additional three weeks. This is further confirmed by information from Global Monitoring of School Closures by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, which reports that schools in Uzbekistan were partially or fully closed for a total of 14 weeks. These school closures and hybrid learning affected around 6 million students in Uzbekistan (UNESCO 2020). We evaluate the impact of the COVID-induced school closures due to the pandemic on learning outcomes of school pupils. Individual-level data for 2019 and 2021 allows us to account for possible pre-existing differences across cohorts, mitigating bias concerns.

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