Research on the Influencing Factors of K-12 Students' Engagement in Home -based Online Learning during COVID-19 Pandemic

In the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 pandemic emerged in many regions of China, and the spring semester of primary and middle schools was postponed At the call of "Suspension of Classes but not Learning" by MOE, all educational institutes adopted the online learning methods. However, the home-based online learning lacks teacher supervision, peer support, classroom environment constraints. These intensify students' attention difficulty when compared with face-to-face learning in the classroom, which makes students' learning engagement more important to ensure the learning effect. According to online focus group interviews with the education experts and K-12 teachers respectively, the researchers found out some possible influencing factors to K-12 students' online learning engagement: perceived teacher involvement, perceived parental involvement, students' self-discipline, and student emotion. Therefore, this study proposes a prediction model from the above four aspects. By using multivariate linear regression analysis and variance analysis, this study finds: (1) Perceived teacher involvement, perceived parent support, student selfdiscipline and student emotion all have significant positive effects on online learning engagement. (2) There are significant differences in students' online learning engagement for different learning stages and different network environments at home Students' online learning engagement has no significant difference between urban and rural areas.

Exploring individuals' effective preventive measures against epidemics through reinforcement learning

Individuals' preventive measures, as an effective way to suppress epidemic transmission and to protect themselves from infection, have attracted much academic concern, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, a reinforcement learning-based model is proposed to explore individuals' effective preventive measures against epidemics. Through extensive simulations, we find that the cost of preventive measures influences the epidemic transmission process significantly. The infection scale increases as the cost of preventive measures grows, which means that the government needs to provide preventive measures with low cost to suppress the epidemic transmission. In addition, the effective preventive measures vary from individual to individual according to the social contacts. Individuals who contact with others frequently in daily life are highly recommended to take strict preventive measures to protect themselves from infection, while those who have little social contacts do not need to take any measures considering the inevitable cost. Our research contributes to exploring the effective measures for individuals, which can provide the government and individuals useful suggestions in response to epidemics. © 2021 Chinese Physical Society and IOP Publishing Ltd