COVID-19 and the Academic Performance in Sweden´s Elementary Schools : Investigating the change in schools´ average merit scores in upper level of elementary education due to the COVID-19 outbreak

Sammanfattning: Sweden was one of the few countries in the EU that in most cases decided to keep their elementary schools open during the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of this study was to investigate potential outcomes COVID-19 has had on students´ average merit scores as well as group-specific effects across genders and school types. To further estimate which factors might have also influenced students´ success, we decided to consider the share of higher educated parents and the municipality income for compulsory schools in our research. Using the fixed effects method, a few models were constructed to analyze the different effects. We found that in general, COVID-19 had a significant and positive effect on the average merit score of students across all elementary schools in Sweden, suggesting that there have been other factors influencing their academic performance. Furthermore, it was found that gender disparities and the share of higher educated parents have affected the average academic performance, whereas the municipality income for compulsory schools did not. Lastly, private schools were found to perform less positively compared to public schools.