Mobile Technology as an Alternative Teaching Strategy Amidst COVID-19 Hiatus: Exploring Pedagogical Possibilities and Implications for Teacher Development

Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the education sector worldwide had to adapt rapidly from in-person to virtual modes of teaching and learning to mitigate the spread of the virus. In a short period of time, teachers were forced to find new and innovative ways of delivering education to their students to ensure the continuation of education. In this context, this paper investigates how teachers in Pakistan leveraged mobile technology as an alternative teaching strategy to provide access to and to ensure the continuation of education. Through in-depth interviews with 13 selected teachers, this study explores the potential of mobile technology to offer alternative teaching and learning arenas. The findings underscore the importance of embracing new pedagogical possibilities offered by mobile technology and the significance of effective teacher professional development in the post-pandemic era. This study provides valuable insights into the utilization of mobile technology in the education sector, even in the most challenging circumstances, and highlights the potential for mobile learning to contribute to education reform.

The Impact of School Strategies and the Home Environment on Home Learning Experiences During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Children With and Without Developmental Disorders.

Using the Opportunity-Propensity Model (Byrnes in Dev Rev 56:100911, 2020; Byrnes & Miller in Contemp Educ Psychol 32(4);599-629, 2007), the current study investigated which factors helped predicting children's home learning experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, thereby examining differences between children with (DD; n = 779) and without (TD; n = 1443) developmental disorders. MANCOVA results indicated more negative experiences for DD children and their parents. SEM-results revealed the alignment between different teachers and autonomous motivation in children as the most important predictors for the outcome variables. Less predictors were significant for DD as compared to TD children which suggests other factors are at play in the DD group. Limitations, strengths and suggestions for future research are being discussed, together with some implications for classroom practices and remote learning approaches.

Identifying regulation profiles during computer-supported collaborative learning and examining their relation with students' performance, motivation, and self-efficacy for learning

The present study unravels profiles of regulators, based on online measures of collaborative learners' adoption of individual-oriented and socially shared metacognitive regulation (SSMR) during asynchronous computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL). Additionally, it investigates how the regulation profiles are related to students' conceptual understanding after CSCL and to their motivation and self-efficacy for learning. 196 university students participated in the study. Hierarchical and k-means cluster analysis are adopted to identify the regulation profiles, whereas ANCOVA and MANOVA are run to study how the regulation profiles are related to respectively students' performance and learner characteristics. The results revealed three regulation profiles, labelled as ‘all-round-oriented and affirming regulator’ (AOAR), ‘social-oriented and elaborating regulator’ (SOER), and ‘individual-oriented and passive regulator’'(IOPR). The regulation profiles differed significantly in their conceptual understanding, motivation for learning, and self-efficacy beliefs. The current results serve as a stepping stone for lecturers and researchers to design customized metacognitive scaffolds in CSCL-environments and to examine their effectiveness in future intervention studies, advancing both the emerging literature on SSMR and educational practice.