PARIS — The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) will hold a webinar on the effects of COVID-19 on education on Oct. 15 where Andreas Schleicher, OECD director for education and skills, and Dr. Jonas P. Bertling, director of large-scale assessment questionnaires at the educational testing service, will discuss the effects the pandemic and how to help governments respond.

"The COVID-19 pandemic has caused widespread disruption to schooling across the globe, leading to learning losses for huge numbers of students in multiple countries. These losses can have a dramatic impact not only on the success of individual students, but on the performance of the education system as a whole," said the OECD in a statement.

"Knowing that future progress may be at stake, countries are now trying to find ways to assess just what impact the crisis has had and how student learning experiences have changed, as well as trying to find a way to gauge how crises in general affect education systems.

"To address this, the OECD has developed the PISA Global Crises Module. About 62 student questionnaire items and 68 school questionnaire items were created following a process that involved input from leading questionnaire development experts, PISA National Centers, as well as small-scale cognitive interview studies in three countries.

“While all countries were affected by the pandemic in some way, the module seeks to illuminate the different effects on student learning and well-being, and the degree of interruption or changes to education across different systems." — WAM