Young children and families' home literacy and technology practices before and during COVID-19

The home is an important setting for young children's learning and development. We examined home literacy practices and technology usage among families with children ages 5–6 years old (N = 47) before as compared to during COVID-19 with bivariate analyses. Variations by household income were also investigated. Parents completed surveys on home literacy and technological practices and demographic information in the spring of transitional kindergarten and the following kindergarten year. Results demonstrated an increase in child technology usage for school related educational programs, from pre-COVID-19 to COVID-19 and a decrease in home book reading, storytelling, writing, and playing games during COVID-19 home learning. Transitional kindergarten parents from the upper-income bracket reported significantly lower technology use of educational games compared to those in the lower-income group pre-COVID-19. Kindergarten parents from the upper-income bracket reported significantly higher technology use of educational games and lower technology use in watching TV to fall asleep, compared to those in the lower-income group during COVID-19. Findings suggest that there are few differences in home learning environments across family income groups. By characterizing how parents utilize technology and literacy practices with their children, we can better understand how to support families through COVID-19 and beyond. © The Author(s) 2023.

A Survey of Human-Computer Interaction Technology in Intelligent Home for Children's Learning

The development of the COVID-19 epidemic has increased the home learning time of children. More researchers began to pay attention to children's learning in home. This survey reviewed the frontier and classic cases in the field of interactive design of children's home learning in the past five years, analyzed tangible user interface, augmented reality, and multimodal interaction in human-computer interaction of children's home learning. This paper reviewed the application of interactive system in children's learning and points out its positive side in development of ability, process of learning, habits of learning, and environment of learning of children. Through analysis, we advise that it is necessary to create home learning applications, link smart home systems, and build an interactive learning environment for smart home learning environment design. Finally, we point out the technical and ethical problems existing in the current research, proposes that intelligent perception, emotion recognition, and expression technologies should be introduced in the future, and looks forward to the development of this field. © 2023 Institute of Computing Technology. All rights reserved.

Living and learning through lockdown: a fictionalisation of the challenges and opportunities of homeschooling during a global pandemic

This article reports on research which investigated the lived experiences of primary school headteachers, teachers and parents during the first lockdown in England between March and July 2020. The study aimed to understand how homeschooling was approached and the challenges and opportunities it afforded. Individual semi-structured interviews were undertaken with participants and the findings are presented in the article in three episodes using fictionalised scenarios. The episodes created are the initial approach to homeschooling, coping with uncertainty and realignment. The themes emerging from each episode are pragmatic decision-making, change and the impact upon welfare and well-being, and shifting priorities. The article illustrates the struggles of homeschooling in lockdown and some surprising outcomes, and also points to future possibilities for education.

Conducting Remote Design Research on Embodied, Collaborative Museum Exhibits

Research activities in interaction design and HCI were widely altered by the COVID-19 pandemic, with many studies shifting online as health concerns inhibited in-person research. Tangible and collaborative activities are often used in informal learning spaces and child-computer interaction, but they are neither designed for nor easily adapted to online formats. In this case study, I present findings and reflections on my experience adapting an in-situ study of embodied, collaborative museum exhibits to a remote user study during COVID-19. I identify several considerations and notes of inspiration for researchers working on similar projects, which I hope can aid in furthering iterative design research on embodied and/or collaborative activities both during the ongoing pandemic and in other current and future contexts that require remote research or interactions. The reflections I present in this case study additionally play a role in documenting the ongoing history of interaction design as researchers adapt to the rapidly changing global circumstances caused by COVID-19. © 2023 Owner/Author.

Holes, Patches and Multiple Hats: The Experiences of Parents of Students with Special Education Needs Navigating At-Home Learning During COVID-19

In the spring of 2020, schools across Canada and beyond closed as a public health measure to address the growing COVID-19 global pandemic. The abrupt shift to at-home learning necessitated, for many children, significant engagement by parents and family members. This chapter brings forward the perspectives of 36 Canadian parents of students with special education needs as they supported the learning of their children during school closures. Analyses of in-depth interviews revealed interrelated influences of community, family and school supports, parent efficacy and mental health. Stories shared by parents highlighted the weaknesses of school systems that were exposed when the first wave of the pandemic hit. Lessons learned include the need to develop and sustain networks of support for families of students with special education needs, particularly working mothers, and the importance of building authentic and productive partnerships between families and schools. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022

Conditions of distance learning and teaching and their relation to elementary school children's basic number skills after the suspension of face-to-face teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic

The suspension of face-to-face teaching, due to the COVID-19 social distancing regulations, raised serious concerns about the impacts on children's academic learning. Because the implementation of distance education in Germany was entirely the responsibility of individual schools, and because the home learning environments varied across households, school children had very different learning conditions during the pandemic. This fact raises questions whether the conditions of distance learning has impacted children's development of basic number skills. In this paper, descriptive information on children's home learning conditions and teachers' distance teaching approaches during the pandemic, socio-cultural capital, and basic number skills of 484 third and fourth grade students (51.2% girls) in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia (Germany) are assessed. The data revealed risk factors such as not having a tablet/laptop, lack of access to the internet, or a learning environment with siblings without an adult family member present. A negative association was found between multiple risk factors (at-risk levels) in home learning and basic number skills. This link was partially mediated by socio-cultural capital and moderated by teachers' distance teaching approach. Children whose teachers applied a more personalized teaching approach showed fewer negative relations between at-risk levels and basic number skills. While no evidence was observed for positive effects of videoconferencing, school-based emergency classes, or private tutoring on basic number skills, children whose learning was supported by learning management systems showed better skills than their peers. The findings highlight the differential impact of home-based learning conditions during the pandemic and provide practical implications for realization of distance teaching. Copyright © 2023 Orbach, Fritz, Haase, Dowker and Räsänen.

Home learning: An exploration of parents perspectives

ABSTRACT Much home learning research explores the benefits from the perspectives of the child or staff. Less is written about how parent's view home learning. This became more noticeable recently when nurseries closed because of Covid-19 lockdown. Staff had to design digital home learning activities at speed to help parents support their children's learning and development while maintaining their relationships with parents. However, we realised we did not know enough about what parents would find helpful and decided to seek their views to categorise their perspectives of home learning and therefore provide more relevant home learning. This paper records a small-scale explorative study in a group of 9 London nurseries where using ethnographic interviews, we sought the views of 15 sets of parents. The study presented some early evidence that parent's views of home learning can be categorised and suggests an emerging typology made from four groups of parents whose views of home learning reflect their levels of confidence and experience but for some, their views appear to be filtered through the current public debate in England about school readiness. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

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)

National qualifications in Scotland: A lightning rod for public concern about equity during the pandemic

Scotland, traditionally, has high levels of confidence in teachers. Fairness and justice are key concepts in policy and practice in Scottish education. For more than 100 years, the high‐stakes assessment system in Scotland, with the Scottish Higher qualification at its heart, has been crucial to that sense of opportunity and justice. However, in 2019–2020, public confidence in high‐stakes assessment in Scotland, as in other United Kingdom countries, was dented. In Scotland, the Covid‐19 pandemic meant that schools were closed, teachers provided online learning opportunities for pupils working at home and, for the first time in 130 years, it was not possible to run national examinations. To ensure that learners were not further disadvantaged, alternative approaches to gathering evidence for qualifications were instigated. However, these results were challenged as socially unjust and the results that had been nationally moderated were replaced by results based on locally moderated teachers' professional judgement. As Scotland looks to qualifications beyond Covid‐19, trust must be re‐built. This article reports on a participative research project that sought to understand public perceptions of standards and fairness across a range of key communities following this experience. Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative data, we analyse factors which affected trust in National Qualifications under the pandemic. The evidence suggests that when considering what matters for qualifications to be trusted, technocratic solutions are likely to be rejected by stakeholders. Understanding and responding to what led to the mistrust of qualifications in Scotland will be crucial to inform its future qualifications system.

Intelligent Modeling for In-Home Reading and Spelling Programs

Technology-based in-home reading and spelling programs have the potential to compensate for the lack of sufficient instructions provided at schools. However, the recent COVID-19 pandemic showed the immaturity of the existing remote teaching solutions. Consequently, many students did not receive the necessary instructions. This paper presents a model for developing intelligent reading and spelling programs. The proposed approach is based on an optimization model that includes artificial neural networks and linear regression to maximize the educational value of the pedagogical content. This model is personalized, tailored to the learning ability level of each user. Regression models were developed for estimating the lexical difficulty in the literacy tasks of auditory and visual lexical decision, word naming, and spelling. For building these regression models, 55 variables were extracted from French lexical databases that were used with the data from lexical mega-studies. Forward stepwise analysis was conducted to identify the top 10 most important variables for each lexical task. The results showed that the accuracy of the models (based on root mean square error) reached 88.13% for auditory lexical decision, 89.79% for visual lexical decision, 80.53% for spelling, and 83.86% for word naming. The analysis of the results showed that word frequency was a key predictor for all the tasks. For spelling, the number of irregular phoneme-graphemes was an important predictor. The auditory word recognition depended heavily on the number of phonemes and homophones, while visual word recognition depended on the number of homographs and syllables. Finally, the word length and the consistency of initial grapheme-phonemes were important for predicting the word-naming reaction times. © 2023 by the authors.

The association between home learning during COVID-19 lockdowns and subsequent school attendance among children with neurodevelopmental conditions.

BACKGROUND: Children with neurodevelopmental conditions have high levels of school absence. During the COVID-19 pandemic, schools closed for many students. The relationship between home learning during school closures and subsequent school attendance requires attention to better understand the impact of pandemic education policy decisions on this population. This study aims to investigate the association between home learning, hybrid learning and school learning during school closures (in January-March 2021) with subsequent school attendance (in May 2021) in children with neurodevelopmental conditions. METHODS: An online survey was completed by 809 parents/carers of 5- to 15-year-old autistic children and/or children with intellectual disability. Regression models examined the association of learning location during school closures with subsequent school absence (i.e., total days missed, persistent absence and school refusal). RESULTS: Children who were learning from home during school closures later missed 4.6 days of a possible 19. Children in hybrid and school learning missed 2.4 and 1.6 school days, respectively. The rates of school absence and persistent absence were significantly higher in the home learning group even after adjusting for confounders. Learning location was not associated with subsequent school refusal. CONCLUSIONS: Policies for school closures and learning from home during public health emergencies may exacerbate school attendance problems in this group of vulnerable children.

LabMate: Development and Implementation of a Novel Livestreaming Platform for Hybrid or Remote Laboratory Course Delivery.

Online course delivery has increased in prevalence, particularly due to the onset in 2020 of the COVID-19 pandemic. Biomedical engineering laboratory courses pose unique challenges when transitioning to a remote or hybrid space. Here, we describe a novel approach to online lab delivery to improve student learning and engagement in a required introductory biomedical engineering laboratory class. The presented work focuses on the implementation and assessment of a novel approach to remote lab delivery named LabMate, which is a mobile, multi-view livestreaming platform that connects students to an in-person class remotely. Surveys of student and instructor participants assessed hardware quality and areas of improvement. Focus groups with students who had taken the course in an online format previously were conducted after a demonstration of the system. Survey responses were overall positive; however, some areas of improvement were identified, such as audio quality and video quality. Students and instructors appreciated the ability to deliver class synchronously online rather than perform make-up labs. Focus group participants found LabMate to be more engaging and enjoyable than prior online lab experiences. Students and instructors preferred LabMate over other online lab delivery methods. The students found the experience to be more dynamic and engaging, providing them with the opportunity to develop some of the core competencies of a biomedical engineering student.

Families with young children during the COVID-19 pandemic-The importance of family type, perceived partnership roles, parental stress, and social support for changes in the home learning environment during lockdown.

Beginning in March 2020, the lockdown precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in many challenges, especially for families with young children. Many children had little or no access to institutional education. Therefore, they were even more dependent on their parents providing them with home learning activities (HLA) to support their development. We examined the adaptability of families with regard to changes in parents' provision of HLA in traditional two-parent families, single parent families, and large families compared to before the lockdown. We focused on family resources, such as a supportive distribution of roles within the partnership, or social support, as predicting factors of adaptability in N = 8,513 families with children aged 18-69 months. In addition, we considered parental stress as a further influencing factor. The cross-sectional data depicts families from a nationwide online survey, which we conducted during spring 2020 in Germany. We found that (a) all three family types offered their children more learning activities at home, albeit with slight differences between the families. However, (b) we identified differences in the factors influencing families' adaptability: Across all family types, we found slight to medium negative relations between adaptability and parental stress. The relations were most evident in large families. Furthermore, social support exhibits somewhat positive relations to the adaptability of large families. For adaptability in single-parent families, gender differences were initially evident. Among single fathers, the change in parental HLA was stronger than among single mothers. However, this relation disappeared when we took parental stress and social support into account. For traditional two-parent families and single parents, our analyses revealed (c) barely significant relations between the investigated predictors and changes in HLA during lockdown. Overall, our study confirms that high stress limits the adaptability of providing HLA in families and that social support mitigates negative relations between stress and the provision of HLA, especially in large families. In order to develop effective and needs-based family support programs, it is therefore important to help parents cope with stress and provide them with low-threshold social support. The extent to which these services need to be adapted to different family types must be surveyed in more depth.

Parents' experiences of mathematics learning at home during the COVID-19 pandemic: a typology of parental engagement in mathematics education.

The COVID pandemic disrupted the schooling of students worldwide resulting in many having had a period of at-home learning. Many parents found themselves assuming responsibility for supporting their children's at-home learning. Parents often find it difficult to support their children's mathematics learning compared with other curriculum areas. There has been limited research exploring parental engagement in mathematics education generally, and little into parental engagement in mathematics education during the COVID pandemic. This paper examines how parents supported their child's mathematics education during the school closures and identifies the factors that impacted this engagement. The Ecologies of Parental Engagement (EPE) model was used to help describe the engagement of different parents in mathematics education during the school closures and to examine the way the home space and available capital shaped parental engagement. Eight parents were selected from a larger Australian study that explored the impact of the pandemic-induced period of at-home schooling on primary school mathematics and science. One-on-one narrative interviews were conducted online with participants. Analysis identified three categories of parental engagement: monitors, facilitators, and enhancers. Parents in each category responded to their role in at-home learning differently, and accessed and activated different capital to support their child's at-home learning in mathematics during the pandemic. Results highlight the value of emotional capital, as well as knowledge of mathematics and mathematics education, with implications for schools hoping to engage parents in mathematics learning. The study offers a typology to be explored in future research concerning parental engagement in mathematics education.

Physical home learning environments for digitally-supported learning in academic continuing education during COVID-19 pandemic.

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, digital technologies for distance learning have been used in educational institutions worldwide, raising issues about social implications, technological development, and teaching and learning strategies. While disparities regarding access to technical equipment and the internet ('the digital divide') have been the subject of previous research, the physical learning environment of learners participating in online learning activities has hardly been investigated. In this study, the physical-spatial conditions of learning environments, including technical equipment for distance learning activities and their influence on adult learners in academic continuing education during initial COVID-19 restrictions, were examined. Data were collected with an online survey sent to all students enrolled in an Austrian continuing education university, together with a small number of semi-structured interviews. A total of 257 students participated in the survey during the 2020 summer semester. Our findings provide insights in two infrequently-studied areas in learning environment research: the physical learning environment for online learning and the learning environment in academic continuing education. The study illustrates that students in academic continuing education have spacious living conditions and almost all the equipment necessary for digitally-supported learning. According to gender and household structure, significant differences were found regarding technical equipment, ergonomic furniture and availability of a dedicated learning place. In their learning sessions during the restrictions, students reported low stress levels and positive well-being. The more that they perceived that their physical learning environment was meeting their needs, the higher were their motivation and well-being and the lower was their stress. Their learning experience was further improved by the extent to which they had a separate and fixed learning place that did not need to be coordinated or shared with others. The study contributes to the literature on creating conducive learning environments for digitally-supported online learning for adult learners.

Socioeconomic and gender inequalities in home learning during the COVID-19 pandemic: examining the roles of the home environment, parent supervision, and educational provisions

Objective: School closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic left millions of pupils to continue their education at home. We investigated gender and socioeconomic inequalities in pupils' home learning, and some mechanisms underlying those inequalities. Method: We analysed online survey responses from 3,167 parents collected between May and July 2020 in the UK, when most schools were closed. Results: Boys, pupils who were eligible for free school meals (FSM), pupils from families that were financially struggling, and pupils whose parents had not graduated from university were less engaged and spent less time home learning. Pupils of non-graduate parents found home learning challenging because they were less likely to have someone in their home who could supervise their work. Pupils eligible for FSM and from financially struggling families found home learning challenging because of noise, a lack of space, lack of technology and insufficient internet in their homes. The quality of educational resources schools provided positively predicted engagement and learning for all pupils. Conclusion: Pupils from lower socioeconomic status families and boys were less involved with home learning, although for different reasons. We discuss how these findings can inform policy and practice to reduce educational inequalities resulting from school closures. © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Supporting Parents of Children with ADHD During COVID-19 School Closures: A Multiple-Baseline Trial of Behavioral Parent Training for Home Learning.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, schools rapidly changed from in-class instruction to remote learning. Parent involvement and management of the home learning situation was greatly emphasized, and this presented challenges and opportunities for parents of children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). There was an urgent need for effective parent support in the home learning situation, particularly for parents of youth with ADHD. The current study implemented a behavioral parent training (BPT) program, an evidence-based intervention for childhood ADHD, modified to target home learning and be delivered via telehealth. The intervention was evaluated in a multiple baseline trial across families of youth with ADHD (n = 3). The primary outcome was daily, parent-reported academic engagement during home learning. Parents also completed daily ratings of their child's respectful and disruptive behavior, and remote, home observations of academic tasks were recorded at baseline and post-treatment. Based on visual analysis of baseline, treatment and post-treatment daily ratings, two of the three participants had a positive response to treatment indicated by improved academic engagement. These findings provide preliminary support for the home-learning, telehealth-delivered BPT program in supporting families during the COVID pandemic. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12310-023-09569-y.

Home and school interventions aided at-risk students' literacy during Covid-19: a longitudinal analysis.

We examined whether different parent- and teacher-related factors had an effect on at-risk children's reading development during the first six months of the Covid-19 pandemic. Seventy Grade 1 English-speaking Canadian children (28 females, 42 males; M age = 6.60, SD = 0.46) who were at-risk for reading difficulties were administered word and pseudoword reading, nonverbal IQ, and phonological awareness tasks before the school closures (February 2020; Time 1). Reading tasks were administered again when they returned to school in September 2020 (Time 2). In April-May 2020, their parents (n = 70) and teachers (n = 40) filled out a questionnaire on the home literacy environment and the frequency of teaching reading and providing reading materials, respectively. Results of multilevel regression analyses showed that children's reading enjoyment and home learning activities predicted both word and pseudoword reading at Time 2. Differentiation of instruction for struggling readers also predicted children's pseudoword reading at Time 2. These findings reinforce the important role of parents in their children's early reading development particularly when the typical agents of instruction (i.e., teachers) have less time and opportunities to interact with their students because of the pandemic.

Physical home-learning environments of traditional and non-traditional students during the COVID pandemic: exploring the impact of learning space on students' motivation, stress and well-being

When the COVID-19 pandemic forced higher education institutions to implement their programs in an online setting, different groups of students were influenced to different extents. In many cases, the main locus of learning moved to students' homes, and their learning experiences were suddenly contextualized in their residential situation and immediate physical learning environment. The present study consequently examines the role of physical learning environments on different factors influencing students' learning when pursuing their study from at home. It contrasts the situation of traditional students in a higher education institution and non-traditional students in an academic continuing education institution, which address target groups with different living conditions and needs in learning support. Data were collected via an online survey sent to students enrolled in these two institutions, with a total of 353 students participating during a timeframe impacted by COVID-related lockdowns. We found that stress and well-being is strongly linked to the quality of the surrounding environment of the learning place, whereas perceived motivation is more strongly related to the quality of the learning place itself. How strongly students are affected by these factors is moderated by their overall socio-spatial context. Academic continuing education students are more resilient to sub-optimal physical learning environment than traditional students. Altering the design of the immediate learning environment consequently can help to mitigate factors that negatively impact students' well-being and learning motivation, which is particularly important for traditional students, who primarily dedicate their time to pursuing their studies. © 2023, The Author(s).

Strategies implemented by South African teachers to ensure continuing mathematics education during COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to present severe challenges to the education sector more than 2 years after the first case was detected. We explore the strategies South African teachers used to support continued mathematics learning at home during the COVID-19 pandemic across different stages of the response to it and across different contexts. We explore these strategies, first, in relation to the initial shift to emergency remote teaching when learners needed to be reached in their homes under severe lockdown regulations, then through the gradual reopening of schools later as regulations were relaxed. Activity theory informs our perspective on the way in which teachers worked to mediate learning across school and home activity systems. Twenty-five Grade 4-7 mathematics teachers from the Eastern Cape responded to two questionnaires given at the start of the COVID-19 lockdown period and during the phased return to school. Questions focused on the strategies used to support mathematics learning. The results show that strategies focused on engaging caregivers through various technologies and getting resources into the home. WhatsApp, a free internet-based messaging service, was the most frequently used communication app across all types of schools for both messaging parents and sending instructional material and support in the form of videos, pictures and text messages. Department issued workbooks and teacher designed work packs were key resources sent to homes. Differences are evident in the range of use of different technologies across wealthier and poorer schools. Primary teachers' voices inform possible ways forward for the purpose of managing young student mathematical learning gaps and meeting ongoing learning needs.