Children and COVID-19 Research Library

This paper analyzes the association between disease outbreaks and adolescent pregnancy. The COVID-19 pandemic presents an urgent international concern for adolescent reproductive health. For instance, the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone indirectly caused a 65% increase in AP within target communities. School closures and economic downfall following periods of quarantine augmented sexual exploitation. Therefore, COVID-19 underlines the need to evaluate and learn from prior health policy in strategizing more effective AP prevention legislation. Reviewing Ecuador’s attempts to reduce AP, first through the implementation of differentiated services for adolescents, then via establishing an integrated lifecycle model, and lastly, their current strategy involving gendered violence, demonstrates how each plan has varied in effectiveness yet collectively failed to create an upstream approach that builds human capital.

This paper's proposal is that students aged between 10 and 12 can benefit from interacting with a friendly learning companion using p-code such as Alcody. The hypothesis is that students (aged between 10 and 12) with a knowledge of Scratch will be able to significantly improve their scores by using a learning companion to teach them how to program even during the COVID-19 pandemic. To check the hypothesis, an experiment was carried out during the 2019/2020 academic year with 137 students in Ecuador. A significant improvement in the scores of the students was recorded together with high satisfaction.

The COVID-19 pandemic has closed schools around the world, forcing school systems and students to quickly attempt remote learning. A rapid response phone survey of over 1,500 high school students aged 14 to 18 in Ecuador was conducted to learn how students spend their time during the period of quarantine, examine their access to remote learning, and measure their mental health status. The data show that 59 percent of students have both an internet connection at home and a computer or tablet, 74 percent are engaging in some online or telelearning, and 86 percent have done some schoolwork on the last weekday. Detailed time-use data show most students have established similar daily routines around education, although gender and wealth differences emerge in time spent working and on household tasks. Closure of schools and social isolation are the two main problems students say they face, and while the majority are mostly happy, 16 percent have mental health scores that indicate depression.