Children and COVID-19 Research Library

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted education for approximately 1.2 billion students across the Asia-Pacific, and forced the closure of many schools, precipitating a transition towards remote learning, albeit with uneven access and quality, and threatening to deepen the ‘learning crisis’ that already existed, particularly for the most vulnerable learners. As education systems in the Asia-Pacific seek to recover the learning loss due to the pandemic and address the broader learning crisis, it is incumbent on governments to identify appropriate recovery strategies in the short term. Also, governments need to support education system transformation so that all learners reach minimum proficiency in numeracy and literacy and acquire competencies needed to fulfil their potential –personal, social and economic. Learning recovery strategies will differ across the region, not the least because schools were fully or partially closed1for different lengths of time -for example, India (82 weeks), Indonesia (77 weeks), and Bangladesh (73 weeks). Other countries saw shorter closures, such as: Vanuatu (4 weeks), Papua New Guinea (6 weeks), and the Solomon Islands (7 weeks).

Teachers are the most important actors in improving students’ learning outcomes and thus in addressing a learning crisis in the region. Moreover, the unprecedented and extensive school closures caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have affected about 43 million teachers in school education in the Asia-Pacific region. These teachers were at risk of losing their jobs due to budget cuts, they had to address the new challenge of teaching remotely, as well as worrying about their own and their families’ health and well-being. Throughout the school closures, teachers continued to teach under extremely fluid and trying conditions: increased workloads, having to use new and unfamiliar technologies without adequate training, experiencing a lack of materials for online instruction, high levels of physical and mental stress, and insufficient support.

 

School closures occurred extensively during the COVID-19 pandemic, and occur in other settings, such as teacher strikes and natural disasters. The cost of school closures has proven to be substantial, particularly for households of lower socioeconomic status, but little evidence exists on how to mitigate these learning losses. This paper provides experimental evidence on strategies to support learning when schools close. We conduct a large-scale randomized trial testing two low-technology interventions— SMS messages and phone calls—with parents to support their child in Botswana. The combined treatment improves learning by 0.12 standard deviations, which translates to 0.89 standard deviations of learning per US$100, ranking among the most cost-effective interventions to improve learning. This study developed remote assessment innovations, which show robust learning outcomes. Its findings have immediate policy relevance and long-run implications for the role of technology and parents to support education provision during school disruptions.

On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. In response, governments around the world took the unprecedented step of closing all schools as a way to curb the spread of the COVID-19 virus. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) estimates that school closures impacted almost 1.6 billion learners across 169 countries. Most children in this study experienced school closures, or partial or temporary re-openings, well into 2022. Education systems had very unequal capacities to respond to school closures with remote learning and support to children and families. The most common format remote learning took was online learning (91 per cent), yet 1.3 billion of the 1.6 billion students out of school had no internet connection at home—let alone a device to learn on—and internet literacy was extremely low among students, teachers, and parents.10 Moreover, the majority of the estimated 300 million learners with online access were in high- or middle-income countries. Children in humanitarian settings were among the least likely to be able to access digital education. This digital divide exacerbated education inequalities everywhere. In low-income and humanitarian settings, school closures also amplified the pre-existing learning and school access crisis and cut children off from the protective services schools often provide.

The world is in the depths of a learning crisis, made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic. This report finds that COVID-19-related school closures and other disruptions have sharply increased learning poverty, a measure of children unable to read and understand a simple text by age 10. The report, The State of Global Learning Poverty: 2022 Update, a joint publication of the World Bank, UNICEF, FCDO, USAID, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and in partnership with UNESCO, stresses that even before the pandemic, there was already a learning crisis. Since then, COVID-19 has sharply increased learning poverty, with COVID-driven school disruptions exacerbating the severe pre-pandemic learning crisis.

This article analyses data from a study that explored distance learning teaching and nursery school children's experiences in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Douala, Cameroon. Following the spread of COVID-19 to Africa, the Cameroon Government placed emphasis on the impact of the pandemic on the socio-economic sector and actions to support this sector. There has been no reported research on the effects of the pandemic on the early childhood education sector and how children have experienced it. This article discusses distance learning techniques employed by teachers from a private nursery school and the views and feelings of young children whose teacher encouraged them to draw and tell stories about their experiences. Engaging in such conversations empowered and encouraged children to verbalise their COVID-19 Lockdown experiences. These conversations can help the teacher rethink and seek new ways to understand and guide children through challenging situations. In addition, the insights gained from the study can be helpful for policymakers concerned with maximising the capacity for schools and families to ensure continuous learning for all children in the event of a crisis.

With the closure of schools as a result of the social distancing plan, the negative emotions that individuals experience became complicated. Therefore, the present study provided a deep understanding of the concerns and stresses of parents, students, and teachers about the process of social distance planning and reopening of schools during COVID-19 pandemic. This directed qualitative content analysis was conducted in 2020. The data for this study were collected through semi-structured interviews with teachers (n=28), students (n=20), and their parents (n=32) in Tuiserkan County. Sampling was performed by purposeful sampling method with the maximum variation. Data analysis was performed simultaneously with data, collected by content analysis method.

Since the spring of 2020, many early childhood education programs (pre-K, K, 1st, and 2nd grades) had to close as governments around the world took serious measures to slow down the transmission of COVID-19. As a result, the pandemic forced many early childhood teachers to start teaching online and continue supporting their students remotely. Unfortunately, there were few lessons that these teachers could learn from experience to cope with this change since online learning in early childhood settings had been scarce until the outbreak of the pandemic. In response, the goal of this interview study was to investigate how early childhood teachers in public and private schools implemented online learning during the pandemic, the challenges they encountered when teaching online, and their suggestions to address these challenges.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to worldwide school closures, with a risk of learning loss. Sweden kept primary schools open, but it is unknown whether student and teacher absence and pandemic-related stress factors affected teaching and student progress negatively. In this study, reading assessment data from 97,073 Swedish primary school students (grades 1-3) were analysed to investigate potential learning loss.

Contextualized in the prolonged period of COVID-19-related school suspension in Hong Kong, the present study unravels relationships among socioeconomic status (SES), parental involvement, and learning outcomes for a matched sample of 186 primary and 932 secondary school students and their parents who participated in the eCitizen Education 360 survey. Three-step latent profile analysis (LPA) revealed different types of parental involvement at home and in school. For the primary school sample, students’ SES did not predict membership in the parental involvement typology, but students whose parents provided more home monitoring and support had the highest level of online self-efficacy. As for the secondary student sample, students whose parents provided more home monitoring and support tended to have access to more home learning resources. Students whose parents provided home monitoring and support had the highest levels of online self-efficacy, acquisition of digital skills, and cognitive-emotional regulation, and were the least worried about school resumption. The study underscores complex patterns of parental involvement and identifies effective parental involvement practices that contribute to students’ home online learning during the school suspension.

This study aims to analyze the implementation of Distance Learning (PJJ) in biology learning in high school including implementation, obstacles, and results. The method used in this research is descriptive method. The population includes all high school students in the Bogor Regency area for the 2020/2021 academic year and biology teachers in the Bogor Regency area with a sample of 337 students from 10 schools and 60 biology subject teachers. This research data collection technique uses a questionnaire or a questionnaire via google form which is analyzed by describing various research results in the form of percentages.

This study aims to discover the literacy skills of 5th grade primary school students during covid-19 outbreak in Mandailing Natal Regency based on teachers’ perceptions. Descriptive qualitative approach was applied with a simple quantitative support in form of percentages. The respondents in this study were 23 primary school teachers of fifth year class from 23 different primary schools located in 23 districs in Mandailing Natal Regency. To obtain the data, a semi structured interview was conducted adapted from four literacy skills consisting of listening, speaking, reading and writing. The obtained data subsequently were analyzed by thematic analysis based on specific separated themes.

The unprecedented arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic made the schools in the country adopt online mediums and platforms, so that learning may continue without causing potential harm to every student's health. Due to the non-availability of data on online distance learning readiness of senior high school students in Public Senior High School X, together with the dearth of literature that could guide school administrators and stakeholders in the school in crafting empirically established programs, projects, and innovation, the study was conducted. The study employed a descriptive-comparative and -correlational approach. It was participated by 346 senior high school students determined through multi-stage sampling. Their level of online distance learning readiness was assessed using a standardized instrument. Data were analyzed using mean, standard deviation, Mann-Whitney U test, and Spearman rho rank correlation.

During the new coronavirus epidemic in 2020, the number of online learning platform users grew explosively, with secondary school students becoming the main group of online learning platform users. Especially the virtual clinical learning environment of online learning platform for secondary school students, as one of the main factors affecting users’ sustained use, has become an important issue companies and researchers are faced with. This paper, taking secondary school student users as the research object, constructed a model of factors influencing users’ intention to continuously use the online learning platform for secondary school students. The model, based on TAM model and ECM model, consisted of 10 variables, including TP-Teaching presence, resource quality, system quality, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, academic identity, self-efficacy, users’ satisfaction, teacher-student relationship, and behavioral intention.

Face-to-face classes were temporarily suspended and shifted to modular print learning modality due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The study aimed to determine if there significant difference and relationship between parents’ involvement in modular distance learning and the academic performance of the Grade 6 learners in a public elementary school.