By Cardarello Fierro, M.
The analysis of the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has across the different sectors in the economy should include the evaluation of educational performances during 2020. This study is focus on the multidimensional factors that impacted on the Maths test scores of the sixth-grade students in Uruguay, including those relating to the health emergency. A set of supervised algorithms were performed to approach a better understanding of the determinants of the educational performance. In the second part, an unsupervised analysis was implemented to detect a set of components that describes the main features of the students (PCA) and classifying them into groups, based on their similarity (k-means).
Educational evaluations constitute a fundamental tool to monitor the achievements of the educational systems of the countries, as well as for the design of public policies that improve their quality. For this purpose, the National Institute of Educational Evaluation of Uruguay (INEEd) has been implementing the “Aristas” tests since 2017, in which educational achievements are evaluated from a multidimensional perspective. In addition to measuring the performance of students in Reading and Math tests, “Aristas” collects information about their social emotional skills, opinions and attitudes about the coexistence, among other conjunctural factors. In 2020, the evaluations were performed, despite of the particular background because of the pan- demic, with the aim of “generating inputs that allow contributing to develop policies to mitigate the possible effects of the COVID-19 pandemic”, according to INEEd (2021).