COVID-19 education policy often relied on older research despite available new evidence

Policymakers are increasingly relying on scientific research, but it remains unclear whether policy decisions reflect the latest available evidence. Building on a previously developed semantic matching approach, we use pretrained language-model embeddings to identify newer studies that are substantively related to research cited in policy documents. We then examine whether these related studies were already available before the policy documents were published. Applied to COVID-19 education policy, the analysis shows that policy documents often continued to cite established pre-pandemic research even when similar post-2020 studies had already been published. This pattern suggests that policy decisions do not always keep pace with newly available research. The approach provides a scalable way to diagnose how quickly policy systems incorporate emerging evidence across domains.