The effects of remote learning on slife students from Central America during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT

The Covid pandemic caused changes in education of which we may never know or understand all its repercussions to the public education system. One group of vulnerable students, newcomers from Guatemala and Honduras with limited or interrupted formal education (SLIFE), were negatively affected. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, one SLIFE program sent its students home in the spring of 2020 to quarantine and did not return to in-person learning again until a year later. The purpose of this quantitative, causal comparative study is to investigate the effects of remote learning during the Covid-19 pandemic on SLIFE students' education while attending an urban school's SLIFE program for adolescents in southwest Ohio. The research was a longitudinal design using dependent or paired-samples t tests, comparing SLIFE students' English and mathematics end of semester grades during face-to-face learning in the first semester of the 2019-2020 school year versus the same SLIFE students' English and mathematics end of semester grades during remote learning in the first semester of the 2020-2021 school year. A statistically significant difference was found between school years, confirming a decline in SLIFE student achievement while learning remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. Conclusions and recommendations for future research and practices are included. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)