ABSTRACT
This paper offers the first empirical evidence of the impact of COVID-19 on dietary diversity among children and adolescents in urban and rural families by using panel data collected in 2019 (before COVID-19) and 2020 (during COVID-19) in northern China. Our study uses panel data from 2,201 primary school students and 1,341 junior high-school students to apply the difference in differences (DID) method to estimate the impact of COVID-19 on dietary diversity among students in urban and rural families. We found that the dietary diversity score (DDS) of rural students decreased by 0.295 points (p < 0.01) compared with that of urban students during COVID-19. Specifically, COVID-19 significantly reduced the frequency of rural students' consumption of vegetables by 1.8 percent, protein-rich foods such as soybean products and nuts by 6.0 percent, meats by 4.0 percent, aquatic products by 6.7 percent, and eggs by 5.3 percent, compared with urban students. Further, COVID-19 had a significant negative effect on the dietary diversity of students from low- and middle-income groups, with the DDS of the low-income group decreasing by 0.31 points (p < 0.01) and that of the middle-income group by 0.12 points (p < 0.1).
ABSTRACT
In China, education is being impacted by Coronavirus Disease 2019, known as COVID-19 for short, which affects millions of families. Under such a special circumstance, higher education is supposed to not only shoulder its mission of teaching and educating, transferring knowledge, but also assume the heavy responsibility of maintaining social stability and building spiritual home. Under this general situation, in which Chinese puts epidemic prevention and control first, colleges and universities gradually carry out online teaching in China. However, a variety of problems surface in this practice. How about the effectiveness of the online teaching? What are the challenges faced by higher education? Can online teaching meet the educational demand in this special period? The authors consider the characteristics of the epidemic emergency, the challenges faced by teaching in colleges and universities, and the current teaching mode, and put forward some suggestions for the current practice, hoping to provide reference and inspiration for the practice of online teaching in colleges and universities. © 2020 IEEE.