one-sixth of the reading losses and one-tenth of the math losses observed in Dutch primary education during the COVID-19 pandemic (Haelermans et al., 2022). We further explore whether sleep disruption might drive these negative effects. We find that high temperatures during the night before the test negatively affects students’ test scores. Our results on school heterogeneity provide suggestive evidence that better school building quality might diminish adverse effects of temperature on student test scores. This chapter makes several contributions to the existing literature. First, we examine the effects of temperature in a European context in a moderate climate zone. Previous research has demonstrated that extreme temperatures, both hot and cold, negatively affect student performance (e.g., Cook & Heyes, 2020; Dang et al., 2024; Johnston et al., 2021; Park, 2022; Park et al., 2020). Previous studies on the effect of temperature on student performance are, however, mostly performed in the U.S. (e.g., Graff Zivin et al., 2018; Park, 2022; Park et al., 2020; Roach & Whitney, 2022), and to a lesser extent in China (Graff Zivin et al., 2020), India (Garg et al., 2020), Australia (Johnston et al., 2021), Korea (Cho, 2017), and Vietnam (Dang et al., 2024). Unique to this European context is the moderating influence of the Atlantic Ocean, which leads to milder winters and cooler summers along the western coast of Europe than would be expected at similar latitudes elsewhere. On the one hand, it remains uncertain whether students in moderate climates experience adverse effects from temperature, as the extremes in these regions are likely less severe than those in more extreme climates. On the other hand, it could be that individuals’ responses to extreme temperatures are more adverse in areas whether such extremes are less common, as proposed 111
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