Children and COVID-19 Research Library

The article investigates the response of the Pakistani curriculum to the Covid19 outbreak. It also looks into the development of a curriculum that addresses the specifcities of students’ situations, while reminding them of global connectedness. The article is based on semi-structured interviews with 10 curriculum experts, 20 principals, and 35 teachers, as well as content analysis of the 2018 National Curriculum Framework of Pakistan.

A year after - as the world still grapples with COVID-19, children and families' lives are being turned upside down with devastating impacts on children and their rights. From health systems are being overwhelmed, economies are sliding down, and children have had their education disrupted by school closures, these conditions affect children from around the world including children from the world’s poorest countries in Asia. To mark the one-year anniversary of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Save The Children Asia Team presents ‘Under the Same Sky: How a year of Covid-19 affected Asia-Pacific children’.​ This brief focuses on how children’s daily lives have changed, comparing how they spent a day before the pandemic and during it across the Asia region. It also reviews the impacts & changes to the lives of children in the past 1 year. Reflects on the impact of school closures, home isolation/quarantine, and community lockdown on children's wellbeing and education & health. It includes policy asks on the need for strengthening social protection systems for the most marginalized and vulnerable children in a post-pandemic world.

The pandemic of childhood obesity that has been increasing over the last decade has collided with the current pandemic of COVID-19. Enforced behavioural changes have resulted in a  myriad of problems for children particularly in weight management. Restricted activity is the most obvious but many other aspects of life have exacerbated biological, psychosocial, and behavioral factors identified as risks for childhood obesity. Significant effort is required to turn around the prevailing tide of weight gain necessitating changes in personal and family behavior and diet, as well as high-level governmental and educational policy.

We are facing a COVID-19 education crisis. As this report finds, schools for more than 168 million children globally have been closed for almost a full year. With every day that goes by, these children will fall further behind and the most vulnerable will pay the heaviest price. The unique findings presented in this report provide an overview of school closures from March 11, 2020 to February 2, 2021 in more than 200 countries and territories, relying primarily on the data from the UNESCO tracker of school closures and UIS database on school enrollment. As we enter the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, no effort should be spared to keep schools open or prioritize them in reopening plans. Children cannot afford another year of school closures.

The coronavirus pandemic has impacted the education systems worldwide and most, including the Israeli, have transitioned to online learning. Moreover, closing schools has extreme social, cultural, educational and economic implications on the student, teacher and parent populations. This is especially true for students from families of lower-socio-economic status and young students who need parental assistance. Furthermore, online learning is not suitable for all teachers, because some lack the technological capabilities needed.

This note introduces parental uncertainty into parent–child monetary transfers. A parent questions the probability distribution of a child’s future economic success. As a result, the parent endogenously tilts his/her subjective probability model away from an approximating probability model. In this case, parental transfers increase with model uncertainty, thereby reducing the child’s effort and probability of economic success. This theoretical result raises several empirical questions, of which two are as follows. For one thing, informed parents (e.g. those who hold the same job as their child) transfer less money, and their child exerts more effort. Another is that economic uncertainty (e.g. recessions or pandemics) prompts higher parental transfer payments and reduces the child’s effort.

Especially in traditional, rural, and low‐income areas, children attend school irregularly. School‐based interventions are common mitigation strategies for infectious disease epidemics, but if daily attendance is not the norm, the impact of schools on disease spread might be overestimated.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused both unprecendented disruptions and massive changes to education. However, as schools return, these changes may disappear. Moreover, not all of the changes are necessarily the changes needed in education. This paper argues that the pandemic has created a unique opportunity for educational changes that have been proposed before COVID-19 but were never fully realized. It identifies three big changes that education should make post COVID: curriculum that is developmental, personalized, and evolving; pedagogy that is student-centered, inquiry-based, authentic, and purposeful; and delivery of instruction that capitalizes on the strengths of both synchronous and asynchronous learning.

The corona virus pandemic at the international and national levels constitutes a real problem for health, economy, trade and certainly education. In Morocco, general confinement, since March 20, 2020, is an obligation to limit the spread of this virus. The Ministry of National Education decided to close education and training institutions on March 16, 2020. It adopted, in parallel, several proactive and preventive measures to deal with this pandemic on several levels, including distance education. Certainly these measures taken in the field of education are highly important, but require reinforcement for a continuous improvement of the safety and health of learners and the professional body.

This report presents an empirical overview of what works to support learning outcomes for girls in emergencies. Research shows that girls in emergencies are disadvantaged at all stages of education and are more likely to be out-of-school than in non-emergency settings. Girls are also struggling to learn. This solutions book seeks to highlight promising evidence-based actions in education for decision makers who are designing and implementing interventions to support girls’ education in low and middle-income country humanitarian settings and settings where education has been interrupted by the COVID‑19 pandemic. It documents practical examples of approaches that have been or are being tested, and from which lessons can be drawn. The overarching aim is that this evidence be used to inform programming in crises and support diverse stakeholders in mitigating the impact of emergencies on girls’ education.

Strengthening the digital literacy of its youth populations has been a key challenge for ASEAN countries. Digital literacy refers to a person’s ability to use digital platforms for finding, consuming, evaluating, creating and communicating digital content. In an increasingly digitalized world, young people’s success often depends on such skills as it determines their capability to participate in a modern labour force and make well-informed decisions on matters that affect their lives. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the digital transformation of ASEAN societies and further highlighted the importance of digital literacy . The educational, private and work life of young people has changed dramatically with the rise of online learning and remote working. Investing in the digital skills of young girls and boys will help them adapt to this new situation, acquire new skills and knowledge, increase their ability to connect with different people and communities and express their voices, contribute to the success of ASEAN businesses in increasingly competitive global markets and help ASEAN nations to achieve their social development goals through its empowering effect on young people.

The adoption of technology in teaching has been identified to relate to various factors from attitudes and self‐efficacy to subjective norms and digital references. The aim of this study is to broaden the perspective to hierarchical grouping effects. Multilevel modelling of the study utilizes the data of 2355 Finnish basic education teachers. The results show that, before the coronavirus pandemic, Finnish teachers used digital devices in teaching at least once a week, on average, and many times on a daily basis, varying according to the subject being taught. The variation in teachers' technology usage occurs mainly at the individual level, with a small proportion between schools; higher‐level hierarchies proved redundant in the context of Finland. At the teacher level, digital skills, age, and digital self‐efficacy increase technology usage in teaching. At the end, the significance and limitations of the research and the direction of future research in the post‐pandemic era are discussed.

This chapter focuses on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the education service, which is typically classified as a service industry in industrial classifications. Digital transformation in the education sector has attracted significant attention recently. The distance education is becoming a new normal in the education service. However, the education community in general is not ready to maximize the merits of distance learning. We need to change the role of instructors from a knowledge teacher to a learning motivator and progress manager. In addition, we need more investment in ICT infrastructure in the education service to enhance educational effects.

Using data collected through a telephone-based survey in rural Bangladesh during the height of the pandemic, this study presents evidence on the effects of COVID-19-led lockdown and school closures on children, focusing on three child-related outcomes: time use of children during the school closure, plans regarding children’s schooling continuation, and the incidence of child marriages.

As countries usher in 2021, children throughout the world continue to grapple with unprecedented hardships resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic that turned the world upside down in 2020. The global health crisis prompted lockdown efforts that raised the risk of violence, hunger, child labor, child marriage, and school dropouts—particularly among girls. It also curtailed opportunities for children to engage in activities aimed at promoting their right to be heard. Recent research shows children are eager to have their voices heard and to play a pivotal role in halting the spread of the virus and minimizing its negative impacts. During consultations for this policy brief, children reported it was very important that they maintain strong peer participation groups and connections to other adolescents and children during lockdowns. They also shared that participation during lockdowns helped promote positive mental health and lessen anxiety and loneliness.