Children and COVID-19 Research Library

High quality and culturally responsive early childhood education and care (ECEC) for young children before kindergarten is seen as a way to ensure that all children enter school ready to learn. ECEC is even more crucial in the context of recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and the disproportionate burden of trauma and stress borne by families of color in disinvested neighborhoods. Remote learning and repeated disruptions to in-person instruction as protocols shifted during waves of the pandemic placed an extra strain on families, and may have increased educational disparities in the U.S. Taken together, these challenges have implications for children’s school readiness due to their impact on opportunities for learning at home and in the classroom. This paper explores how ECEC programs can be strengthened to better meet children’s needs, and ways in which future research can shed light on these important issues.

Relationships between families and schools are important in the educational experiences of young children. However, the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2019 and spread rapidly around the world disrupted many families, teachers, early childhood programs, and other child-support institutions. There is much to be learned on how this pandemic specifically affected parent–teacher relationships. This study examined whether parent, teacher and other program characteristics had an impact on early childhood parents’ ratings of the quality of their relationships with teachers.

Early Care and Education (ECE) sites are critical hubs for social, emotional, and physical learning development of preschool children (ages 3–5). The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted ECE enrollment and participation; until June 2022, preschool children in the US were ineligible for COVID-19 vaccines. It is critical to identify perceptions of teachers/directors and parents to enhance safe return-to-school efforts. Focus groups (n = 7; 22 participants) were conducted with ECE teachers/directors throughout Arizona to examine perceptions of COVID-19 testing for families and staff at ECE sites, and current and possible COVID-19 mitigation strategies during Summer 2021. Preschool parents from underserved families in Phoenix (n = 41) completed a brief survey on their perceptions of benefits of ECE for themselves and their children, thoughts on COVID-19 mitigation strategies, and timing for safe return to school during Spring 2021. Focus groups were transcribed and analyzed for themes using constant comparison.

The subject of this interpretative research is knowledge about the planning, organisation and implementation of remote kindergarten education by kindergarten teachers of the Lubusz and Lower Silesian voivodeships using non-standardised interviews. The need for a sudden transition to remote education highlighted not only shortcomings in institutions preparing online classes, but also the low digital competences of kindergarten teachers, as well as children and their parents. The school managements did not present a position, but simply had talks with the teachers about how to implement remote preschool education. Teachers described how their remote work evolved, from simple transfer of materials, through texts read, experiments, theatres, or films.

The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on demands, resources, and job satisfaction among a convenience sample of early childhood education (ECE) staff employed in Head Start preschools in a large metro area of Colorado. A survey was administered to a sample of Head Start staff at two timepoints: Time 1 (pre-COVID-19 pandemic) in October of 2019 (n = 137) and Time 2 (during the COVID-19 pandemic) in November of 2020 (n = 86). The survey consisted of a combination of validated measures to assess personal and external demands and resources and work satisfaction.

Test-to-stay (TTS) is a strategy to limit school exclusion following an exposure to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). This study evaluated the use of TTS within universally masked kindergarten through 12th grade (K-12) school settings following household SARS-CoV-2 exposure. Three hundred twenty-two participants were enrolled. Serial rapid antigen testing was performed up to 15 days post-exposure. Analysis-eligible participants completed the 15-day testing protocol, tested positive any time during the testing window, or received a negative test on or after day 9. Primary outcomes included within-school tertiary attack rate (TAR) (test positivity among close contacts of positive TTS participants), and school days saved among TTS participants.

COVID-19 pandemic and the associated lockdown have con-fined children to their homes and have resulted in an exponential increase in screen usage among children. This review aimed to scrutinize changes in screen time rate and duration in children and the correlation with increased risk  of  language  delay  in  children  under  two  years  old  with  any  screen time or screen time for more than 1 hour in children 2—5 years old during the COVID-19 pandemic. Method: In this systematic review journal, we searched the database from PubMed and Google Scholar with the keywords of screen time OR computer OR television OR video game OR YouTube OR digital screen time AND COVID-19 OR SARS-Cov-19 AND preschool children OR birth to 5 years on January 13th, 2022.

This national survey study aims to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on early development of rural preschoolers in China and compare the urban-rural gap. Participants were 11,282 rural preschool teachers recruited through the stratified random sampling method. They completed the survey online via wjx.com, the dominating online survey platform in China. The study compared the results with our previous research on 22,466 urban teachers and found: (1) most preschoolers in rural China had development improvement during the quarantine; (2) there were no significant urban-rural differences in early development; (3) three distinct profiles of rural preschoolers emerged: the low, medium, and high levels. Those 3–4 year-olds in public preschools in western China tended to have development loss or even development regression; and (4) increased parental involvement was found the significant predictor of rural preschoolers’ development improvement during the quarantine.

This paper offers a nuanced perspective of two families’ lockdown literacy journeys with their young children during the COVID 19 pandemic. It presents informal home learning examples stimulated by play and by school-sanctioned synchronous and asynchronous activities from homes geographically miles apart yet close in terms of shared experience. In response to the catch-up and learning loss narrative which threatens to overshadow some of the positive learning experiences taking place at home, it redirects the ‘catch-up’ narrative towards a nuanced understanding of family learning at home by articulating the complexity of circumstance. Methodologically, drawing on Autoethnography, it presents vignettes of lockdown life from Scotland and Michigan, USA.

This study aims to determine the opinions of preschool pre-service teachers on the adequacy of online drama lessons throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. A descriptive survey model of the qualitative research methods was used and online drama lessons were run over a 12-week[1]period. Participants of the research were 64 pre-school prospective teachers who studied as senior students at a Turkish state university. In order to investigate the online applicability and effectiveness of practice-based drama lessons during this critical COVID-19 pandemic time, lesson planning has been avoided, considering that the elements that should be included in formal drama teaching should also be included in online drama. In the process of data collection, prior to online lesson, objectives and outcomes of online drama practices were designated with senior pre-service teachers in the department of pre-school education at a state university. The three researchers administered online lessons devised in accordance with the determined objectives and outcomes to eighty pre-school students. And they focused on the alignment of the dramatic structure constituents with function and the adequacy of the activities in the preparatory stage for the transition to the dramatization stage. Furthermore, activities in the dramatization stage and evaluation stage were examined in terms of adequacy in meeting the outcomes. Lesson plans were structured with the consideration that elements that are present in the formal drama instruction must be included in online drama practices, as well.

The major interruption is going to occur in children learning at all stages of Education because of worldwide closure of Educational institutions. Such interference in formal schooling experiences adversely affect academic outcomes of school age children. This study was qualitative in nature and phenomenology research design was adopted to investigate, how COVID-19 impacted early childhood care and Education in Pakistan. Sample selected through criterion sampling, a purposive sampling method. This study was based on 17 in-depth semi-structured interviews from teachers and parents of pre-school children.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, German early childhood education and care (ECEC) institutions had to limit their provision of ECEC, implement protective measures, and handle new organizational tasks. Data from two longitudinal surveys (October 2020 to July 2021) among ECEC managers and pedagogical staff were analysed. Limited staff resources, limited access, and high pandemic-related challenges (i.e. difficulties and conflicts related to implementing protective measures), were negatively associated with the frequency of pedagogical practices (Models 1, 2). Manager ratings suggested increased developmental needs for children with low socio-economic status; also higher frequency of pedagogical practices at early stages of the pandemic (T1) was associated with lower increase of developmental needs at a later stage (T2, about 5 months later). In sum, this contribution provides evidence about how the COVID-19 pandemic might have affected quality in ECEC provision on both the structural and interaction level and how this, subsequently, impacted child outcomes.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the education system faced unprecedented challenges, including global school closures, the cancellation of face-to-face teaching, and ultimately school step-wise or partial reopening. Childcare providers have faced additional significant stressors from the beginning of the outbreak. The present study aimed at investigating the effect of childcare providers’ regulatory emotional self-efficacy on their subjective well-being (i.e. positive and negative affect), including indirectly through a reduction in stress during the first COVID-19 lockdown in Italy. Three hundred and sixty-four childcare providers at daycares and preschools in Italy participated in the study by completing an online survey. A structural equation model revealed an indirect effect between self-efficacy beliefs in the management of negative emotions and negative affect, via stress. More specifically, childcare providers with high self-efficacy beliefs in the management of negative emotions experienced less negative affect, alongside lower levels of stress.

This study explored the consequences that the COVID-19 pandemic did to kindergarten teaching in a Chinese context. From February, 2020 to September, 2020, students in China did not take any traditional classes at school. Instead, the government took a novel measure to move all the courses online so that the students and the teachers did not need to go to the school but they could still have their normal lessons continued. However, kindergarten teachers were not required to give any online lessons for children due to the children’s lack of the ability to study independently and they could not focus on one thing for too much time. Therefore, it was possible to investigate what kind of activities teachers provided for children; what were kindergarten teachers’ experiences of teaching during the pandemic and whether teachers were satisfied with their jobs under the pandemic circumstance.

The COVID-19 crisis presented teachers and families with the challenge of educating young children online. This study explored the experiences with virtual education of 51 parents and 53 teachers of young children.