Longer school closures are associated with greater declines in grade 8 civic knowledge¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · associational r3 · q2
Currency · newest study 2026 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? A one standard deviation increase in school closure duration (47 days) is associated with a 0.04SD larger decrease in average civic knowledge. → Kennedy 2026

Evidence¶

Kennedy 2026¶

Kennedy, A. I., Mejía-Rodríguez, A. M., Strietholt, R. (2026). Civic Education Outcomes After Emergency Lockdowns: International Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic. Preprint submitted to Learning and Instruction. https://github.com/OxCGRT/covid-policy-dataset

q2 · i? · associational · r3

Separate regression model from the same fixed-effects analysis of ICCS 2016/2022 data. The article reports longer closures "are associated with greater declines in average civic knowledge", with a coefficient slightly more negative than the stringency one, though not significantly so.

"The relationship implies that an increase of school closure duration by one standard deviation (47 days, approximately 9 school weeks) would be associated with a 0.04SD larger decrease (or 4-points on the ICCS scale) in average civic knowledge scores for a country."

Discussion¶

Learner Variables¶

• Civic Mindedness — outcome: instruction changes it

Related Claims¶

• Greater COVID-19 lockdown stringency is associated with larger declines in grade 8 civic knowledge across 15 educational systems — related
• Lockdown stringency and school closure duration are associated with greater declines in student trust in civic institutions — related
• Lockdown measures are positively associated with expected political participation but show null or negative associations with expected electoral participation — related
• Stricter, longer lockdowns are associated with increases (or smaller declines) in students' expected protest participation, strongest for legal protest — related
• Robustness of the lockdown-civic outcome associations varies by outcome, with legal protest and trust/closure results most consistent — related
• The COVID cohort scored significantly lower than the control cohort across the whole study duration — related