Education,the science of learning,and the COVID-19 crisis

PROSPECTS - In the COVID-19 crisis, the science of learning has two different responsibilities: first, to offer guidance about how best to deal with the impact of the current situation, including...     

K-12 Students’ Online Learning Experiences during COVID-19: Lessons from China

Online learning has become the new educational pattern during the COVID-19 pandemic and is likely to supplement conventional schooling in the post-pandemic world. Lacking prior online learning experiences, the population of K-12 students deserves our special attention. Using purposeful sampling, this study investigated K-12 online learning experiences in China based on a large-scale survey (N = 118,589). Leveraging both quantitative and qualitative evidence, this study supported online learning as a flexible alternative to conventional schooling in emergency situations with a discussion of its benefits and limitations, and revealed key findings regarding K-12 students’ online learning pattern, experiences, and engagement, as well as the influencing factors. The research findings can inform the future design and implementation of online learning programs in primary and secondary schools.     

Online learning: Learner characteristics and their approaches to managing learning

Using cluster analysis this study investigated the characteristics of learning strategies learners use in online courses with one-on-one mentoring. Three distinct approaches were identified: “Mastery oriented”, “Task focused” and “Minimalist in effort”. Despite the widespread concern that students will have difficulty managing their time in online courses with high level of student freedom, this study found that the vast majority of learners were very effective in their learning strategies. The findings speak well for the potential of distance education environments to provide high quality self-paced learning, accommodating different learning strategies, which is difficult to do in group-paced courses. We further explored how these approaches relate to and interact with, participants’ background and their levels of satisfaction and self reported learning.     

Lessons from Lockdown: Parent Perspectives on Home-learning Mathematics During COVID-19 Lockdown

International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education - During the COVID-19 pandemic, many parents suddenly had to assume responsibility for their children’s learning at home. Research...     

Rethinking Home-School Partnerships: Lessons Learned from Latinx Parents of Young Children During the COVID-19 Era

Early Childhood Education Journal - The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly impacted families from low-income backgrounds. The shift to remote learning has required parents with preschool-age children to...     

COVID-19 learning losses: Early grade reading in South Africa

Using three different studies on early grade reading from no-fee schools across in South Africa, this paper establishes short-term learning losses in reading for grade 2 and 4 students from under-resourced school contexts. We find that in 2020 grade 2 students lost between 57 % and 70 % of a year of learning relative to their pre-pandemic peers. Among a grade 4 sample, learning losses are estimated at between 62 % and 81 % of a year of learning. Considering that in 2020 students in the samples lost between 56 %–60 % of contact teaching days due to school closures and rotational timetabling schedules compared to a pre-pandemic year, this implies learning to schooling loss ratios in the region of 1–1.4. There is some evidence from the grade 4 sample that the reading trajectories of children benefiting more from attending school pre-pandemic – namely girls and children with stronger initial reading proficiency - are more negatively impacted. Mitigating the long-run implications of these learning losses will require a significant pivoting of the education system to ensure that instructional practices are appropriately levelled to optimise learning.     

Online learning under COVID-19: re-examining the prominence of video-based and text-based feedback

During the COVID-19 pandemic, higher education institutions have been faced with a rapid shift to remote digital learning across courses. The resultant proliferation of online learning in traditional, hybrid, and distance higher education courses has enhanced the possibilities for technology-supported student-centered learning design. The prominence of feedback in student-centered teaching could be argued in two ways: (1) instructed learning is based on interaction and communication in which the teacher provides personalized information to students about their progress and (2) feedback is oriented towards students’ improvements, which in turn guides student engagement. Therefore, feedback addressing students’ personal needs integrates multiple dimensions and profoundly influences learning. In response to J. Borup, R. E. West, and R. Thomas (2015)’s article The Impact of Text Versus Video Communication on Instructor Feedback in Blended Courses we discusses the efforts to prepare higher education for online learning. During the pandemic, teachers rapidly faced requirements for providing feedback to students remotely and performing all teaching roles online. The authors in this section build a strong argument that feedback with a supportive function is essential in a time when students and teacher are working remotely. They argued for personalized learning requiring feedback at different points of the learning process that utilizes a range of feedback functions and forms and, most of all, employs contextualization and a situated approach.

     

Global crisis management and higher education: Agency and coupling in the context of wicked COVID-19 problems

Campus crisis management remains an understudied topic in the context of COVID-affected higher education. In this paper, we contrasted the ability to tame the wicked problems brought by the pandemic of COVID-19 in private and public universities in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Colombia, India, Kazakhstan, Uganda, and Ukraine. The cross-country analysis and diversity of institutional types allowed us to consider a wide range of challenges faced by academic leaders and their institutions during the global pandemic. By drawing on institutional policy reviews and interviews with university administrators, we have examined tensions between the human and institutional agencies on these crisis-stricken campuses given differing institutional coupling, sizes, resources, and missions. The focus on agential co-dependencies and institutional coupling lays the ground for conceptualizing campus crisis management as a culturally specific construct in the context of higher education affected by the global pandemic.     

Covid-19 and In(di)genuity: Lessons from Indigenous resilience,adaptation, and innovation in times of crisis

In the midst of the global Covid-19 pandemic, educators are invited to pause and reconsider the legacies this crisis will leave for future generations. What lessons do we take forward in a post-Covid-19 curriculum? This article contemplates the value of Indigenous resilience, innovation, and adaptation in times of crisis—“In(di)genuity”, if you will—and considers its implications on Indigenous knowledge and the curricular discourse more broadly. Despite encouraging developments in Indigenous education since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a settler historical consciousness continues to pervade the modern discourse of Indigenous education, insofar as Indigenous knowledge is often perceived as outdated, irrelevant, or inferior to Western knowledge systems. This problematic misconception ignores the resilience, innovation, and adaptation that Indigenous peoples have demonstrated in the face of historical crises. This article offers an Indigenous perspective on crisis, grief, and renewal in the context of Covid-19 and advocates for the renewal of the Canadian curricular landscape.

     

Medical education and COVID-19 pandemic: a crisis management model towards an evolutionary pathway

Education and Information Technologies - The COVID-19 crisis has had a profound effect on higher education, especially medical education due to its sensitive nature, dealing with people’s...     

The significance of sense in the time of plagues: Curricular responsiveness to the Covid-19 crisis

PROSPECTS - The purpose of this article is to interrogate ways that curriculum can respond critically to already existing global emergencies (including pandemics) while also becoming more proactive...     

Building back better to avert a learning catastrophe: Estimating learning loss from COVID-19 school shutdowns in Africa and facilitating short-term and long-term learning recovery

We model learning losses due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the potential for cost-effective strategies to build back better. Data from Early Grade Reading Assessments in Ethiopia, Kenya, Liberia, Tanzania, and Uganda suggest half to over a year’s worth of learning loss. In modeling losses over time, we found that learning deficits for a child in grade 3 could lead to 2.8 years of lost learning by grade 10. While COVID-19 has stymied learning, bold, learning-focused reform consistent with the literature reviewed in this paper—specifically reform on targeted instruction and structured pedagogy—could improve learning even beyond pre-COVID-19 levels.     

Software for managing complex learning: Examples from an educational psychology course

Inquiry-based instruction including problem-, project-, and case-based methods often incorporate complex sets of learning activities. The numerous activities run the risk of becoming disconnected in the minds of learners and teachers. STAR.Legacy is a software shell that can help designers organize learning activities into an inquiry cycle that is easy to understand and pedagogically sound. To ensure that classroom teachers can adapt the inquiry activities according to their local resources and needs, STAR.Legacy was built upon four types of design principles: learner centered, knowledge centered, assessment centered, and community centered. We describe how a STAR.Legacy constructed for an educational psychology course helped preservice teachers design and learn about effective inquiry-based instruction. This work was supported by grant #R305F60090 from the Department of Education. The authors thank the educational psychology students for their contributions to this paper and Amy Ryce for her editorial talents.     

Structuring learning environments: Lessons from the organization of post-literacy programs

New conceptual and historical work on the nature of literacy and information on several bellwether post-literacy efforts in developing countries furnish a basis for diagnosing some of the deficiencies in current approaches to post-literacy programming. The key issue is the design of a literate environment. Heretofore attention has been concentrated too exclusively on the reading materials and continuing education side of the problem, and insufficient attention has been given to the more critical and difficult aspect: ensuring adequate opportunities for the application of new literate skills. The availability of these functional opportunities is closely related to the possibilities for accumulation and reinvestment of economic surplus in the environment, and to the way in which the related activities are organized. Literacy programs can unite skills relevant to management of local resources with strategies of cultural, political or religious revitalization that mobilize people to use their human resources. They therefore continue to offer an attractive means of initiating a reinvestment spiral from limited initial capital. To realize these potentials at the post-literacy stage, however, requires planning post-literacy before literacy, broadening programs to address primary school leavers as well, and paying greatly increased attention to the economic and social structure of the learning environment.

---

Zusammenfassung Neue konzeptionelle und historische Arbeiten zur Alphabetisierung sowie Informationen über bahnbrechende Nachalphabetisierungsprojekte in Entwicklungsländern bilden die Grundlage, um einige Unzulänglichkeiten bei den derzeitigen Ansätzen der Nachalphabetisierungsprogramme zu diagnostizieren. Die Kernfrage betrifft das Schaffen einer allgemeinen Literalität. Bisher richtete man seine Aufmerksamkeit auf das Lesematerial und die Weiterbildung, während kritischere und schwierigere Aspekte der Sicherung ausreichender Chancen für die Anwendung neuerworbener Alphabetisierungsfähigkeiten nur ungenügend berücksichtigt wurden. Die Schaffung funktioneller Möglichkeiten ist eng verbunden mit den Möglichkeiten zur Akkumulation und Reinvestition des ökonomischen Überschusses in die Umwelt und mit der Art und Weise, wie die aufeinander bezogenen Aktivitäten organisiert sind. Alphabetisierungsprogramme können den Erwerb von Fähigkeiten, die dem Management lokaler Ressourcen dienen, mit kulturellen, politischen oder religiösen Wiederbelebungsstrategien vereinen, damit Menschen ihre menschlichen Ressourcen nutzen. Sie fahren daher fort, durch attraktive Mittel eine Reinvestitionsspirale über das begrenzte Startkapital hinaus in Bewegung zu setzen. Um die Möglichkeiten der Nachalphabetisierung zu nutzen, ist es jedoch notwendig, sie vor der Alphabetisierung zu planen, Programme zu erweitern, damit auch Schulabgänger angesprochen werden, und auf die wirtschaftliche und soziale Struktur der lernenden Umwelt erheblich mehr Rücksicht zu nehmen.

---

Résumé Les dernières études conceptuelles et historiques sur la nature de l'alphabétisation et de la postalphabétisation et les informations sur quelques efforts avantgardistes de postalphabétisation qui ont été recensés dans des pays en développement fournissent une base à partir de laquelle peuvent être diagnostiquées quelques-unes des carences des approaches actuelles de la planification de la postalphabétisation. La question-clé a trait à la création d'un environment lettré. Jusqu'ici, l'attention a été concentrée trop exclusivement sur les matériels de lecture et le côté éducation continue du problème, et l'on ne s'est pas suffisamment préoccupé de l'aspect le plus critique et le plus difficile qui est celui d'assurer des occasions adéquates d'application des compétences d'alphabétisme nouvellement acquises. La disponibilité de ces occasions fonctionnelles est étroitement liée aux possibilités d'accumulation et de réinvestissement du surplus économique dans l'environnement, et à la manière dont les activités connexes sont organisées. Les programmes d'alphabétisation associent virtuellement les compétences pertinentes par rapport à la gestion des ressources locales aux stratégies de revitalisation culturelle, politique et religieuse qui encouragent les individus à utiliser leurs ressources humaines. Ils ne cessent donc d'offrir un moyen intéressant d'instaurer une spirale de réinvestissement à partir d'un capital initial restreint. Pour réaliser ces potentiels au niveau de la postalphabétisation, il convient, cependant, de planifier la postalphabétisation avant l'alphabétisation, d'élargir l'accès des programmes aux absolvants de l'école primaire également, et d'accorder une attention toujours plus grande à la structure économique et sociale du milieu dans lequel l'apprentissage se fait.

     

Tales from three countries: reflections during COVID-19 for mathematical education in the future

How can school mathematics prepare citizens for a democratic society? Answers to this question are not static; they change as society and its problems change. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic with its corresponding disease COVID-19 presents such a problem: what is needed to navigate this complex situation that involves, among other things, mathematics? Using the essay genre, we use three narratives from three countries—Italy, the USA (California), and Germany—to reflect on the goals of teaching mathematics during this crisis and examine aspects of each country’s standards for mathematics education. These three stories are framed by the authors’ backgrounds, experiences, interests, their country’s situation, and response to the pandemic. We first present the three narratives and then examine common issues across them that might provide insights beyond this current crisis, for preparing students to become active citizens. In particular, we focus on three issues: (1) developing a positive mindset toward mathematics to engage with and reflect on real-world problems, (2) improving interdisciplinary connections to the sciences to better understand how science professional practices and insights are similar or different from everyday practices, and (3) considering interpersonal and collective matters beyond the individual.