Learning loss or learning gain? A potential silver lining to school closures in Indonesia

This paper aims to give an insight into the discussion on student learning progress during school closures. We will present the impact of the closures on primary school students’ achievement in Bukittinggi, the third-largest city on the island of Sumatra and a highly urbanised area. The city has consistently performed well in most education-related measures due to a strong cultural emphasis on education and a supportive government (Nihayah et al., 2020), but has been significantly affected during the pandemic as most students are confined to their homes with very limited teacher-student interaction. We use a panel sample of students from RISE Indonesia’s other study in Bukittinggi. We reassessed the sample in 2020, one year after its initial assessment. We then compare the performance of each of the 2020 grade cohorts against the 2019 cohorts to measure the impact of school closures on learning outcomes. To our surprise, our findings suggest that Bukittinggi students’ abilities have actually improved during school closures. This improvement is mainly driven by students with low initial achievement with no differences between genders, while initially high-performing students did in fact suffer from learning loss. The increase is large and significant in both numeracy and literacy - with the gain in numeracy amounting to approximately half of a typical Indonesian student’s gain over their whole schooling years.