Published in Early Childhood Education Journal, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10643-023-01536-1: Interaction quality among children, staff and parents in German ECEC centres in the COVID-19 pandemic - Results from a longitudinal study

Abstract

Early Education and Care (ECEC) centres had implemented a variety of protective and hygiene measures during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of these measures temporarily restricted the behaviour of pedagogical staff, children and parents, for example keeping distance from each other or wearing face masks. This may have made it difficult for staff to offer high quality interactions with a positive, sensitive attitude towards children and parents, as would be important for good pedagogical work. Long-term effects of these distance measures on the quality of daily interactions in ECEC centres are largely unexplored. Based on a panel survey among German ECEC centre leaders over a period of one and a half years, we provide a long-term assessment of the impact of specific protective measures on different levels of interactions within ECEC centres, namely on staff-child interactions, interactions of children with each other and the cooperation between staff and parents. We found child-child interaction largely unaffected by the measures, while staff-parent interaction suffered the most. Communication with parents and regular implementation of pedagogical practices have a stabilizing effect, while keeping distance from children, face masks and (pandemic-related) staff shortages worsen staff-child interactions.

Calculating non-scalar diffraction efficiently via merging Braunbek method and Bluestein method

“…It appears, despite ongoing investigations, that there are still methods to calculate diffracted fields that lack both efficiency and accuracy. This paper proposes a more efficient and accurate method for calculating diffraction through insights from the Braunbek method [11] and the Bluestein method [12]. To recover boundary conditions, fields at the edges of the aperture are replaced with the exact fields calculated through Maxwell's equations.…”