Chapter 5. Heat and Learning in a Moderate Climate: Temperature Effects on Primary School Students in the Netherlands At the student level, we analyze how temperature impacts reading and math performance across differences in gender, parental income, and student ability. At the school level, we investigate heterogeneity regarding school building quality, using the building’s construction year as aproxy. We use individual-level data based on student administration systems from schools across the Netherlands between 2013 and 2023. These data contain test scores of over nine million standardized tests taken by around 775,000 students. We examine reading and math scores, administered biannually in grades one to six. We combine these data with data from the Netherlands Cohort Study on Education (NCO), encompassing administrative data of all Dutch primary school students and information at the school level. We merge this dataset with municipality-level temperature data for the specific days on which tests are administered from the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). Our primary analysis focuses on daily maximum temperatures and investigates their nonlinear effects on student test scores. Our findings reveal a negative nonlinear effect of temperature on students’ reading and math test scores. They indicate adverse effects of temperatures above 20 degrees Celsius, compared to the reference category of 10-15 degrees Celsius. If the outdoor temperature on the test day increases to 30 degrees Celsius, these adverse effects are even more pronounced. On these days, students score approximately 0.02 SD lower on reading and math tests compared to their test scores on days with average Dutch temperatures. This effect is sizable. These temperature-related learning losses are equivalent to approximately 110
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