Distance Learning During the First Lockdown: Impact on the Family and Its Effect on Students' Engagement

Abstract

This contribute investigates how Emergency Remote Education (ERE) impacted families during the spring 2020 Covid-19 lockdown, and in particular, the extent to which the impact of ERE on families, measured in terms of space and equipment sharing, moderates the effect of student and family characteristics on students' engagement. The study derived from the administration of an online survey to 19,527 families with children attending schools, from nursery to upper secondary grade. The total number of student records collected amounted to 31,805, since parents had to provide data for each school-age child in the family. The survey contains 58 questions, divided into three sections, with the first two sections designed to get a reading at family level and the third section to gather data for each school-age child in the family. After verifying the validity of the engagement construct through confirmatory factor analysis, two structural equation models were used to analyze the students' engagement. The main findings reveal how the impact of the ERE on the families has had a significant role in predicting students' level of engagement observed by parents with respect to different predictor variables. Finally, we argue that it is necessary to follow a holistic approach to observe the challenges imposed by the switch of the process of deferring teaching from presence to distance, imposed by the pandemic emergency on families. In fact, a holistic approach can promote student engagement and prevent the onset of cognitive-behavioral and affective problems linked to disengagement in ERE.

Education in a pandemic, learning to guarantee inclusive education from an approach psychosocial

“…The greater motivation with school activities at home was associated by mothers and fathers with the development of collaborative activities proposed by the school; however, said motivation was negatively mediated when there was a greater need to share spaces at home and technological tools [24] .…”

“…Lower performance was observed in students, who generally came from lower-income countries and families [42] . Factors studied that would be associated with said performance correspond to: monetary limitations of the family in access to technological materials [24] , sharing devices with other members of the family [43] , within the group of adolescents identified living in homes that are too full of other people [44] .…”

“…While some research describes a positive effect on the learning process in the period of school closures associated with the female gender, observing that female students were more involved than their male peers [24] and showed better performance in skills self-regulation in tasks involved in online learning [48] ; others have concluded that female students reported greater psychological difficulties coping with school closures and distance learning than male students [23] .…”

The challenge of screen mediated shared reading for children’s learning and engagement

“…Support for the intuitive hypothesis that more in-home distraction can make learning over video-chat more challenging comes from other recent research on children's learning during pandemic-related remote learning situations. When measuring the factors impacting the success of remote learning for school children, Chifari et al (2021) found a latent variable, "impact on the family, " that affected engagement levels. During the first few weeks of lockdown, children's engagement levels were lower if they needed to share a learning space, as well as technological resources, with their family.…”

Italian Hospital Teachers’ Perceptions of Technological and Methodological Innovations after the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…It is widely recognized that this situation had a significant impact on students’ learning and well-being and that prompted an unexpectedly massive use of technologies to ensure continuity of education via remote lessons ( Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2021a , 2021b ). The need to shift from a traditional face-to-face educational paradigm to emergency remote teaching and learning (ERTL) represented a challenge for educational systems, schools, teachers, and families ( Chifari et al, 2021 ), and also affected School in Hospital (SiHo) services – the services that provide educational continuity for hospitalized students – in countries where these are available ( Benigno et al, 2020 ; Caggiano et al, 2021 ; Gajda et al, 2021 ).…”