Etäopetuksen vaikutus oppimistuloksiin suomalaisissa lukioissa koronapandemian alkuvaiheessa

This thesis estimates the effect of remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic on learning outcomes among Finnish general upper-secondary school students, using spring 2021 Matriculation Examination results. The thesis uses observational data, but the empirical design allows for the estimation of a causal effect. Meta-analyses of the research literature have found evidence of learning losses in advanced economies, especially among younger pupils, who have been the focus of most previous studies. In Nordic settings, however, the estimated effects have generally been smaller. The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in Finland in spring 2020 led to a state of emergency and a national transition to remote teaching across all levels of education. The state of emergency and the national requirement to organise remote teaching ended in May 2020, but in June 2020 the Finnish parliament approved a temporary amendment to the Basic Education Act, allowing remote teaching to be implemented by decision of the education provider. In practice, decisions on remote teaching were made by local authorities and school principals, unless the epidemic situation required regional school closures mandated by health officials. Because the severity of the epidemic varied regionally, the amount of remote teaching in upper-secondary schools also varied considerably across Finland. Despite remote teaching and the pandemic, Finland’s Matriculation Examination for graduating upper-secondary school students continued to be organised normally. Because the grading of the Matriculation Examination follows a standardised procedure, the results are comparable before and during the pandemic. This, combined with regional variation in remote teaching, creates a quasi-experimental setting in which the causal effect of remote teaching on learning outcomes can be estimated. The analysis is conducted at the school level using a difference-in-differences design, where the outcomes of schools with higher exposure to remote teaching are compared with the outcomes of schools with lower exposure. The empirical design controls for persistent level differences between schools, as well as examination-period-specific variation that is common to all schools. The thesis finds no statistically significant evidence that higher exposure to remote teaching weakened Matriculation Examination performance when measured at the school level. This result is consistent with evidence from other Nordic studies but differs partly from the broader research literature. The results should nevertheless be interpreted narrowly. The analysis cannot be generalised to other levels of education, and the thesis does not examine the effects of the pandemic on upper-secondary school students’ well-being or later educational outcomes.