Post-Pandemic Onset Trends for Public School English Learners in Virginia. COVID-19 Impacts Research Brief Series No. 3

The COVID-19 pandemic impacted the educational experiences of diverse student populations throughout the country and among Virginia public schools. English Learners (ELs) had a unique set of needs and services prior to the pandemic, and potentially were more vulnerable to pandemic-related disruptions in typical school operations than other student groups. We analyze statewide, student-level administrative data on the composition of the EL population, the identification for and reclassification out of EL services, and the exit of ELs from public school enrollment in kindergarten through grade twelve between the 2010-11 and 2020-21 school years to examine changes between the pre-pandemic period and first post-pandemic onset year (2020-21). Our key findings include the following: (1) Following the onset of the pandemic, the number of students classified as EL decreased for the first time in a decade. Specifically, whereas the number of students classified as EL increased by 26.0% (25,171 more students) between 2010-11 and 2019-20, the number of students classified as EL decreased by 3.2% (3,852 fewer students) between 2019-20 and the first post-pandemic onset year (2020-21). (2) There was a 21.6% decline (6,223 fewer students) in the number of Virginia K-12 public school students newly identified for EL services in 2020-21 as compared to 2019-20. The drop in new EL identification occurred across student groups, but was largest among Hispanic students, economically disadvantaged students, and ninth graders. (3) The number of EL students reclassified as fully English proficient decreased by 57.3% (8,169 fewer students) in 2020-21 as compared to the pre-pandemic period. This decline is nearly three times the size of the previous largest year-to-year change. The drops in reclassification among ELs occurred across student groups and were somewhat larger among Hispanic and economically disadvantaged students. (4) EL students' exits from Virginia public schools in the post-pandemic onset were a continuation of pre-pandemic trends and did not meaningfully vary by race/ethnicity, economically disadvantaged status, or disability status.

Austrian teachers' attitudes and self-efficacy beliefs regarding at-risk students during home learning due to COVID-19

The lockdown of schools in Austria and many other countries due to COVID-19 posed challenges to the school system and especially for teachers of at-risk students. Within the INCL-LEA (INCLusive Home LEArning) study, 3,467 teachers (2,839 females) from all nine Federal States in Austria participated in an online survey after the first school lockdown in early 2020. The main aim of the study was to investigate teachers' attitudes and their self-efficacy beliefs about at-risk students during the first home learning period. Results indicate that teachers' attitudes towards students with a low socio-economic background are more negative compared to attitudes towards students with low skills in the language of instruction (LLS) and students with special educational needs. According to teachers' self-efficacy beliefs, the lowest scores were found for teaching students with LLS. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Empowering Teachers in Rural Venezuela: Ensuring Strong Foundations in Education through Amblema

When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down schools in 2020, the effect on rural areas was significant. Access to the internet in rural areas is limited and cost prohibitive. This article discusses why we must find ways to ensure education delivery in urban and rural areas. Unfortunately, many school systems in developing countries lack the expertise and resources to ensure quality education. That is where programs like Amblema come in and bridge the gap. Amblema promotes the values and virtues of self-reliance. With simplicity at its core, a clear set of measurable objectives, and an easy-to-execute selection of activities, Amblema is an innovative practice for education delivery in both urban and rural areas.

Girls' and Boys' Voices on the Gendered Experience of Learning during COVID-19 in Countries Affected by Displacement

This paper presents research on girls' and boys' gendered perceptions of their learning during school closures due to COVID-19. The research was conducted in ten countries affected by displacement across Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. We applied statistical analysis using multivariate logistic regression models from the results of a survey conducted with parents or caregivers and their children. We complemented the quantitative study with qualitative methodology, which provided a nuanced understanding of girls' and boys' perceptions of their learning and their voiced concerns during the COVID-19-related school closures. Our results show that the children in the displaced settings are likely to perceive a decline in learning during the pandemic, and that the factors influencing this perception differ between boys and girls. Girls' perceptions of learning "nothing" or only "a little bit" were more strongly associated with material barriers, such as limited access to learning materials and household economic circumstances, than was the case for boys. The boys' experience of learning "a little bit" or "nothing" was more strongly associated with increased negative feelings, including feeling sad or worried, increased violence in the home, and increased responsibility for looking after siblings or other children. This research notes the importance of supporting displaced children by providing adequate resources to enable equitable access to learning, and calls for cross-sectoral programming to support displaced children who are dealing with emotional pressure.

Data Disaggregation for Inclusive Quality Education in Emergencies: The COVID-19 Experience in Ghana

The process of data analysis provides, undoubtedly, some of the major challenges facing organizations during the implementation of interventions in emergencies. The challenges are primarily due to the lack of direct access to beneficiaries and the rapidly evolving nature of emergencies. This paper outlines how Plan International's Making Ghanaian Girls Great! (MGCubed) project used phone-based surveys to assess the uptake of a Ghana Learning TV (GLTV) programme implemented in partnership with the government. Due to the emergency context and the need for real-time information to guide the implementation of this intervention, there was little time to undertake a major statistical analysis of survey data. This paper discusses how the MGCubed project adopted a simple data disaggregation method using a logic tree technique to gain valuable insights from the survey data. The method allowed for exploring the insights of the data set in real-time without requiring more complex and time-consuming analysis. All views expressed in this article are the author's and not of FCDO.

The Untold Stories from COVID-19: The Calamity of Implementing Curriculum during a Pandemic

In March 2020, the COVID-19 Pandemic wreaked havoc on our nation's educational system. Students, teachers, and administrators were forced to engage in a new remote learning model, which was unfamiliar. This narrative study draws on the lived experiences of six K-12 teachers in Southwest Ohio urban school districts. The data analysis was examined through the lens of the Science of Learning and Development framework (SoLD). Findings highlight the impact of COVID-19 on curriculum implementation. Results show that unprepared teachers could not pivot to online learning effectively, which may intensify the educational gaps and inequities among students in six urban schools in Southwest Ohio.

Teacher Perceptions of Supporting Students Placed at Risk Socially and Emotionally through a Virtual Writing Camp

Students' social and emotional well-being can impact academic performance, the college planning process, transition to college life, and college retention. Many students have had their mental health and well-being negatively affected by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, especially within the educational setting. When instruction was shifted from in-person to virtual settings during the pandemic's onset in March 2020, students across the world found themselves disconnected from school, teachers, and friends. Leaders of schools and extracurricular programs sought online alternatives for connecting with others while physically separated. More than a year after the onset of the emergence COVID-19, educational leaders are still working to provide quality academic experiences while implementing safe approaches to instruction. The Improving the Blank Page (IBP) writing program was one such organization that shifted to a remote setting with facilitators hosting the first-ever virtual writing camp in Summer 2020. The researchers examined perspectives of teachers involved in the virtual writing camp about their beliefs regarding social and emotional impacts for participating students, all of whom attended high-needs high schools (Title 1 schools with all students receiving free or reduced lunch). Findings, including establishing a virtual writing community and opportunities for self-reflection and confidence building, are detailed within this article, along with recommendations for supporting social and emotional needs of students placed at risk. Professionals, it is critical that these professionals understand and incorporate the unique perspective of youth in foster care.

Pods in Action: Joanna Rosa-Saenz. How a Bootstrapping Parent-Run Pod Served At-Risk Students

When the pandemic closed schools in Denver, an enterprising parent with community connections stepped in to meet immediate needs--and paved a new path to supporting students and families in the future. Joanna Rosa-Saenz determined to "turn negatives into positives" by using whatever means she had to ensure her children and others in the community had a safe space to continue learning. That meant stepping up and creating such a space herself. She converted her basement into a classroom, used her car like a school bus, and devoted her time and energy to support a pod that served up to 14 students at a given time. She welcomed them for as long as they needed to stay and charged no tuition. Older students mostly followed their school's remote instruction, with Rosa-Saenz serving in a supervisory role rather than providing direct academic instruction. True to Montessori-style teaching, Rosa-Saenz involved the older students as mentors for younger students. This article provides details on how Rosa-Saenz operated a pod in her community, which led to strong relationships with students and between students.

Gendered Effects of COVID-19 School Closures: Kenya Case Study. GIRL Center Research Brief No. 11

This brief summarizes a case study that assessed the gendered impact of COVID-19 school closures in Kenya. COVID-19 school closures escalated education inequalities especially for girls and young people in rural areas. These closures exacerbated adolescent mental health issues, food and economic insecurity, and experiences of violence. COVID-19 response programs implemented by both the Government of Kenya and non-state actors were not able to fully mitigate the impacts of school closures for adolescents, teachers, or schools. Continued efforts to understand the implications of school closures and to support vulnerable students are needed. [This brief was prepared with the support of Faith Mbushi, Natalie Wyss, Emily EunYoung Cho, Karen Austrian, Eva Muluve, Laura Muthoni, and Beth Kangwana.]

Dove sta di casa la scuola?

This work presents 'Dove sta di casa la scuola', an online course for teachers promoted by the Small School Movement during the COVID-19 emergency. The course aimed to provide alternatives to lecture-based distance learning using the domestic environment as a context for 'low-intensity' digital learning. Such an experience, involving 7000 Italian teachers, allowed the school system to intervene on those pupils at risk of exclusion from distance learning for reasons related to digital divide conditions. Moreover, it was an opportunity to propose alternatives to a distance model focused solely on the provision of content and video lessons. The training experience has fostered the creation of spaces for the active construction of practices that have crossed multiple and heterogeneous disciplines, ranging from math to philosophy.

Seeking Equity, Agility, and Sustainability in the Provision of Emergency Remote Teaching during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Center for Teaching and Learning Takes an Expanded Role

Objectives: The purpose of the study was to illuminate and assess the experiences and feelings of the staff of a center for teaching and learning at one South African university during the early months (April--June 2020) of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns when it switched from face-to-face teaching to emergency remote teaching (ERT). It explores the practical, operational, ethical, cultural, and emotional questions that the staff of this center dealt with as they supported the university in ERT provision. Method: This paper draws on in-depth interviews with 23 staff members of the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching (CILT) who revealed not only the logistical, technical, and administrative challenges faced during the ERT rollout period but the efforts they made to ensure that their efforts promoted equity (for students), agility (for the university), and psychological sustainability (for themselves). Findings: Using cultural historical activity theory as a lens to assess CILT staff activities, findings indicate that a number of contradictions and tensions emerged during this period--concerning exacerbated inequities, pedagogical compromises, cultural anxieties, and psychological pressures--that could not be fully resolved but only managed. Implications for Research: CILT staff are interested not only in providing logistical, technical, and practical support to a university but also in dealing effectively with the ethical, cultural, and emotional concerns that arise in times of crisis and transition, such as the current one. Understanding what happened during COVID-19 may offer insights into how other centers for teaching and learning can adjust to what will likely remain an unstable future in higher education. Conclusion: The pandemic ruptured the previously organic change and growth that characterized CILT development, transforming it as the staff responded to this South African university's need to provide support to academics and students engaging with ERT.

Identify Students at Risk Based on Behavioural Patterns in Continuous Assessment

Students' success is the ultimate goal of any institution around the world. Early detection of at-risk students can facilitate the instructor or tutor to provide timely support to those at risk of failing the course. In a traditional face-to-face classroom, students can monitor learning patterns in routine interactions. However, teachers in the online classroom have limited information, compared with the face-to-face classroom, to detect students in trouble due to the lack of instance interactions between teachers and students. Particularly, such a problem has become worse than ever since 2020, as online teaching and learning are ubiquitous in the Post-COVID19 Era. In this work, we aim to predict if the student obtains a low course grade based on their behavioral patterns in continuous assessments, which are easy-to-retrieve attributes and available in most e-learning systems. We leverage the ratio of assessment grade to the time spent on the assessment as a useful feature in the machine-learning prediction framework. Experiments on real-world datasets indicate that such a ratio can improve the accuracy of detecting at-risk students. © 2022 IEEE.

Bolstering Graduate Healthcare Student Success Through Emotional Intelligence

Identifying Areas of Need at the Graduate Level WesternU is a comprehensive graduate healthcare university with eight colleges and 27 programs enrolling approximately 3,800 students on two campuses (Pomona, California and Lebanon, Oregon). Since the university's founding, interprofessional and active support for student success has been a key theme. [...]students are more likely to rely on "what got them here" and accept certain ingrained self-concepts. Establishing the Components Needed to Meet These Needs LEAD services are available to any enrolled student, and include: academic counseling, tutoring, workshops and events, college performance committee representation, and a summer program for incoming enrolled students. Across all years and colleges with about 3,800 students, 990 students had visits, for a total of 3,203 sessions. Because of the COViD-19 pandemic, academic counseling is now offered online using Zoom rather than in-person appointments.

New Voices from Intersecting Identities among International Students Around the World: Transcending Single Stories of Coming and Leaving

In this article, we introduce our special issue: International students lived experiences in the era unprecedented by uncertainty and challenges: New voices from intersectional identities. Our motivation and intention, focus, and overall methodological approach for this special issue are discussed. In addition to presenting the contributions of each article to this issue, we also discuss how our (all authors of this special issue) voices reflect our unique experiences of coming to new countries as international students by unfolding our stories and multiple intersecting identities that we experienced.

Instructor Continuity: A Tool for Increasing Student Success in First-Year Composition Sequences

Incorporating instructor continuity into the first-year composition (FYC) sequence represents an opportunity for community colleges to make an informed scheduling and advising decision in order to assist in the goal to increase student success rates in FYC. Utilizing course completion data from a community college in northern Alabama, this study examined the differences in composition class sequences taught by the same instructor and composition class sequences taught by different instructors. Findings indicated that students who had the same instructor for both composition courses in their FYC sequence were more likely to pass the second composition course than students who had different instructors for the courses.

Artificial Intelligence Based Model for Prediction of Students' Performance: A Case Study of Synchronous Online Courses During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Lack of student persistence and retention is significantly hurting the US in producing the required number of qualified graduates, especially in STEM fields. Although many factors contribute to students falling off track, one of the controllable factors is the identification of at-risk students followed by early intervention. Predicting the performance of students enables educators to single out struggling and highly talented students. Struggling students are often identified very late into an academic year, thus leaving little to no time for seeking consultation and determining the best course of action to improve performance. Some of such struggling students resort to dishonest means to catch up or make up at the last minute resulting in a higher number of academic integrity violations being observed and reported. Recently, the COVID-19 pandemic further corroborated the presence of such challenges. This research explores the possibility of using artificial intelligence to identify key elements in small datasets which could contribute to the development of a predictive student performance solution. A small set of data obtained through systematic data collection was used to train a predictive algorithm and aid in the analysis of in-class learning, which would lead to a viable student performance predictive solution. The data was collected for 133 students from a total of four sections of three different courses. With a limited amount of data, we were still able to construct a predictive solution able to produce valuable insights into the behaviors of students. The model's resulting accuracy on the test set is 0.85 and the model indicates that the earliest time to begin predictions is right after the midterm exam. The model performs well in its task to predict student performance and identify correlations between different variables. However, it is at this time subject to limited data which although treatable, can affect the accuracy and its ability to predict a final score numerically. This work paves the ground for future studies on the use of machine learning using in-class learning data, analyzing student learning as a function of time within each session rather than by grades alone.

Formative assessment tasks as indicators of student engagement for predicting at-risk students in programming courses

Previous studies have proposed many indicators to assess the effect of student engagement in learning and academic achievement but have not yet been clearly articulated. In addition, while student engagement tracking systems have been designed, they rely on the log data but not on performance data. This paper presents results of a non-machine learning model developed using ongoing formative assessment scores as indicators of student engagement. Visualisation of the classification tree results is employed as student engagement indicators for instructors to observe and intervene with students. The results of this study showed that ongoing assessment is related to student engagement and subsequent final programming exam performance and possible to identify students at-risk of failing the final exam. Finally, our study identified students impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. These were students who attended the final programming exam in the semester 2019-2020 and who scored well in formative assessments. Based on these results we present a simple student engagement indicator and its potential application as a student progress monitor for early identification of students at risk.

Predicting Students at Risk of Dropout in Technical Course Using LMS Logs

Educational data mining is a process that aims at discovering patterns that provide insight into teaching and learning processes. This work uses Machine Learning techniques to create a student performance prediction model, using academic data and records from a Learning Management System, that correlates with success or failure in completing the course. Six algorithms were employed, with models trained at three different stages of their two-year course completion. We tested the models with records of 394 students from 3 courses. Random Forest provided the best results with 84.47% on the F1 score in our experiments, followed by Decision Tree obtaining similar results in the first subjects. We also employ clustering techniques and find different behavior groups with a strong correlation to performance. This work contributes to predicting students at risk of dropping out, offers insight into understanding student behavior, and provides a support mechanism for academic managers to take corrective and preventive actions on this problem.

COVID-19: Understanding and Responding to the Educational Implications for the Vulnerable Children of Eswatini

In a bid to contain the spread and infection rate of COVID-19, Eswatini closed all its schools on 17 March 2020, and for a year they remained closed. Despite education being the only viable means towards a better future, the closing of schools set-off to heighten prevailing educational disparities towards academic access, experience and achievement for the vulnerable children of the country. Adopting intersectionality as a theoretical framework, the paper seeks to analyse the educational effects of COVID-19 on the vulnerable children of Eswatini. The aim is to identify and discuss how educational systems and processes amidst the COVID-19 era sought to amplify the already compounded, complex and dominant educational disparities for children affected by vulnerability. A systematic literature review was conducted to understand child poverty and vulnerability in Eswatini schools and the implications of the COVID-19 school restrictions on the vulnerable children. Strategies to minimise the adverse effects of the pandemic on inclusive and equitable schooling for the vulnerable children have been suggested.

A Case Study in Mitigating COVID-19 Inequities through Free Textbook Implementation in the U.S

COVID-19, in addition to disrupting the global education system in general, is widening the economic and racial gaps institutions have spent years trying to address. The economic reality is that students who work to support themselves, their families, and purchase educational materials needed to succeed have been disproportionately harmed. This article discusses how the global COVID-19 pandemic is compounding structural inequities inherent in higher education. This requires faculty to reevaluate their role as agents of change in a world that is fundamentally different than it was a short time ago. The experience of one liberal arts institution in the U.S. who moved all courses to free materials in under six months will be recounted as an example of what is possible during extraordinary circumstances if students are truly prioritized during strategic planning.