Children and COVID-19 Research Library

This study is part of a cross-country series designed to share emerging findings in real time from qualitative interviews with adolescents and school teachers in the context of covid-19. Our sample for this study was purposefully selected from an ongoing baseline GAGE impact evaluation study, and includes two cohorts: younger adolescents (10–14 years) and older adolescents (15–19 years), all of whom are in-school (grades 7 and 8). Adolescent respondents were drawn from both urban and rural schools in Chittagong and Sylhet divisions of Bangladesh. The objectives of the research are as follows: 1) to understand adolescents’ experiences of transition from childhood to adulthood, and to identify differences in their experiences by age, gender, disability and geographic location; 2) to identify adolescents’ knowledge of covid-19, and how the pandemic response has affected adolescent lives. To inform the pandemic response, this study aims to understand adolescents’ knowledge, perceptions and practices during the covid-19 pandemic, their challenges and worries, and the coping mechanisms they are using to deal with the evolving situation.

This working paper explores the meanings and experiences of resilience, and its gender dimensions, among a cohort of Ethiopian children exposed to poverty and adversity across the early life course. It asks why some girls and some boys seem to fare well as they transition to adulthood, despite the challenges and obstacles they had faced, while others do less well. The data comprise repeat life history interviews (from ages 12 to 24) and survey questionnaires over a 20-year period (to age 25). Qualitative analysis (n=64) revealed how children’s lives did not follow linear paths, and were easily derailed by unplanned events and shocks, including: (a) climatic shocks; (b) societal influences; (c) school transitions and relations; (d) household changes; and (e) child health and social development. Gender mediated children’s experiences of risk and their individual and family coping mechanisms.

This policy brief draws on a qualitative study that uses a gender perspective to investigate the notion of resilience among a cohort of young women and young men who grew up in poverty in five rural and urban communities in Ethiopia, and who are part of the broader Young Lives longitudinal study of 3000 children and young people in the country.  It asks why some children seem to fare well as they transistion to adulthood, despite the challenges and obstacles they had faced, whilst others do less well.

These timely Guidelines were developed precisely with the aim to assist countries and stakeholders to conduct assessments of their national education legal and policy frameworks. The first edition was published in 2014. Today, more than being just a revision, the new Guidelines have been entirely re-designed and re-written to reflect the new context, trends and challenges. They build on the new knowledge we produced, capitalize on the work carried out in countries, and use improved methodological tools.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused the largest disruption of education in history. Throughout 2020 most governments around the world temporarily closed schools and other learning spaces in an attempt to contain the spread of the virus. At the peak of the pandemic in April 2020, schooling was disrupted for over 1.5 billion learners in more than 190 countries. This unprecedented disruption to education has the potential to roll back substantial gains made on girls’ education inrecent decades, with broader immediate and longer-term effects on the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, including those related to poverty reduction, health and well-being, inclusive quality education and gender equality.

This study provides a global overview and an analysis of the adoption of legal provisions for free and compulsory pre-primary education at national level . By providing a rights-based perspective to the implementation of pre-primary education, the study aims to complement existing literature on SDG Target 4 .2, which focuses mainly on policy outcomes . This study also fills a gap in the existing literature monitoring rights in ECCE, which fall short of providing guidance on the operation alization of the recommendation on universalizing at least one year of pre-primary education of education 2030 . The data collected for this study includes an independent examination of publicly available national legal frameworks, which provide the guarantee within which countries can expand and implement the free and compulsory nature of pre-primary education . This study produces evidence on how countries have implemented international human rights frameworks, which guarantee the right to education and the protection against discrimination in fulfilling this right . By strengthening the global knowledge base on this subject, this study can be used as advocacy opportunity, demonstrating the value and importance of adopting legal provisions for one year of free and compulsory pre-primary education .

If all children are to reach their full potential in life, they must have an equal chance of receiving an education of good quality. The critical importance of education for the prospects and prosperity of individuals, communities and entire nations is recognized in Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with SDG 4 calling for inclusive and equitable quality education for all. However, too often, the most marginalized children are left behind, including girls, ethnic and linguistic minorities, migrants and refugees, children with disabilities, and those from low-income families or living in remote areas. Yet education’s unique power to act as a catalyst for wider development goals can be fully realized only if it is equitable.If all children are to be fully included in education, we need to understand the factors that inhibit and exclude the most vulnerable from learning. The 2021 Central and Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia report on inclusion and education aims to fill key knowledge gaps and provide evidence-based recommendations to assist governments and other key education stakeholders in strengthening inclusion and SDG 4 implementation across the region.

This report aims to support timely and context-relevant policy and programming in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, the State of Palestine (Gaza and West Bank) and Jordan by adding to the evidence base on adolescent girls’ and boys’ experiences during COVID-19. Drawing on mixed methods research it captures the risks and opportunities adolescents face across four low- and middle-income country contexts six to nine months after lockdowns in response to the pandemic were first introduced. With a focus on the intersectional challenges faced by adolescents including by gender, age, marital status, disability and context, the report covers three key domains: education and learning; violence and bodily integrity; and voice, agency and community participation. This is the companion report to a report published in August 2020, ‘I have nothing to feed my family’, which focused on the immediate, short-term effects of COVID-19 and associated lockdowns on girls and boys across the same contexts. The report concludes with key recommendations for policy and programming actors so that efforts to ‘build back better’ post-pandemic can be more effectively informed by adolescents’ experiences and voices.

School closures may reduce the size of social networks among children, potentially limiting infectious disease transmission. To estimate the impact of K–12 closures and reopening policies on children's social interactions and COVID-19 incidence in California's Bay Area, this study collected data on children's social contacts and assessed implications for transmission using an individual-based model.

As a means to counter the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, schools were closed throughout Germany between mid-March and end of April 2020. Schooling was translocated to the students’ homes where students were supposed to work on learning tasks provided by their teachers. Students’ self-regulation and attributes of the learning tasks may be assumed to have played important roles when adapting to this novel schooling situation. They may be predicted to have influenced students’ daily self-regulation and hence the independence with which they worked on learning tasks. The present work investigated the role of students’ trait self-regulation as well as task difficulty and task enjoyment for students’ daily independence from their parents in learning during the homeschooling period.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced school closure thus shifting teaching and learning towards full home-based learning (HBL). Technology plays a key role but the considerations to design online learning environments that meaningfully engage students are complex. This exploratory, qualitative study attempted to elicit eight mathematics teachers’ considerations and perspectives in designing online home-based learning lessons for the engagement of elementary and secondary students.

Family and educational institutions play a decisive role in learning and strengthening habits related to physical activity and health. School has a specific mission in this scope, especially at the first stage of education. Attempting to answer the question of how schools in practice realise these tasks, a study was conducted on the level of physical activity of pupils in classes I–III of primary school, during their participation in compulsory school activities. The study took into account many conditions, in particular, the organisation of school work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Physical activity of the pupils was measured with the use of Actigraphs GT3X+, known also as accelerometers, and the Steps Per Minute Test. The study covered pupils (N = 159) aged 7–9 years, who attended classes I–III of several schools in the region of Eastern Poland.

Under the influence of COVID‐19, people's normal life and activities have been limited, such as the education of children, which leads to the emergence of online preschool education. Since online preschool education is large‐scale and time‐sensitive, the traditional network model cannot satisfy the needs of online education. In this paper, edge computing is adopted to optimize online preschool education, where a task unloading algorithm based on genetic algorithm (TUOGA) is designed to minimize the computing delay of terminal tasks. In order to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm, TUOGA is compared with two task offloading algorithms, and simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms them in the aspect of time latency.

This study examined the feasibility of implementing preventive measures to prevent SARS-CoV-2 transmission across 105 English primary schools in summer 2020 via a survey and interviews with headteachers. High rates of implementation of most recommended measures were noted with the exception of requiring 2 m distance for students, fitting hand sanitizers in classrooms and introducing one-way systems in school corridors. Measures such as regular handwashing and stopping assemblies were considered easy to implement. Majorly challenging measures included distancing between individuals (for students: 51%, N ¼ 99; for staff: 34%; N ¼ 98; for parents: 26%, N ¼ 100), spacing out desks (34%, N ¼ 99), keeping same staff assigned to each student group (33%, N¼ 97) and staggering break times (25%, N¼ 99).