Learning Losses from School Closure Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic for Thai Kindergartners

This paper presents empirical evidence of learning losses from school closure due to the COVID-19 pandemic for kindergartners using a large-scale school readiness survey in Thailand. Its findings indicate that school closure during the outbreak of COVID-19 causes enormous learning losses in cognitive skills, especially in mathematics and working memory. The negative impact is heterogeneous across several dimensions, including child gender, special needs, wealth, having private tutoring, caregiver’s education and parental absence. This paper also estimates daily learning gains, of which significant results confirm that going to school has significantly benefited young children, especially in receptive language, mathematics and working memory.