Our goal was to understand how the COVID-19 has affected education. Thus, the key terms we used to search for data sources were “COVID-19”, “education”, “policy”, and “data”. We found multiple data sources from different organizations. Ultimately we decided to use a data source from the Center for Global Development - a nonprofit think tank that focuses on international development - focussing on the impact of COVID-19 on primary and secondary schooling across the globe. We chose this dataset because of the completeness of the data, its relevance to our research question, and the source of the data. The dataset also integrates information from various reputable international organisations including UNESCO and the World Health Organization, further increasing its reliability.

     The original file is entitled “CGD - COVID Education Policy Tracking”, and is in a Google sheets tracker format. While the Google sheets file comprises multiple sheets, we utilised only the first sheet dedicated to a dataset entitled 'School Closure Tracker - Global' due to its pertinence the research aims of our project. It focusses on the impact of COVID-19 on primary and secondary school closure information for 218 countries, number of confirmed cases at the time of school closure, total weeks closed, the income groups that the countries belong to as per the World Bank categorisation, various modes of remote learning (TV, Radio, and Online), changes to national examinations, and much more.