Online teaching, gender differences and education outcomes: Evidence from Chinese urban high schools during the COVID-19

We examine the short- and medium-term impacts of online teaching during COVID-19 on the academic performance of high school freshmen, employing unique data from three high schools of different academic performance levels in Zhejiang Province, China. We find that relative to the cohort not affected by COVID-19 and experiencing no online teaching in their freshman year, online teaching had short-term negative effects on Chinese performance in the high-performing school and math performance in the mid-performing school but no significant effects on other tests and in the low-performing school. The negative effects disappeared eight months after students returned to traditional classroom teaching, and students in the high-performing school indeed experienced a significant positive effect in math performance. Moreover, following online teaching, girls in key classes in the high-performing school performed better in math in both the short and medium term, significantly narrowing the math performance gap with their male classmates, while boys in the low-performing school experienced significant declines in both Chinese and math in the medium term.