A publication of the American Psychological Association – September 2020.

MONITOR ON PSYCHOLOGY

What did distance learning accomplish?

By Kirsten Weir

Millions of U.S school children ended their academic year via remote learning. How did this unplanned experiment measure up?

More than 56 million students attend public and private elementary, middle and high schools in the United States. Last March, the vast majority of them took part in an impromptu experiment when most schools locked their doors to protect against the novel coronavirus. Overnight, teachers were forced to figure out how to translate face-to-face lessons into remote-learning lesson plans.

As schools kick off the 2020-21 school year, there are many unknowns. Some form of distance learning remains likely-either entirely remote, in combination with scaled-back in-person instruction or as a future possibility if new waves of COVID-19 outbreaks emerge.

As educators and administrators plan for that uncertain future, they must also assess how students fared. The pandemic has presented many new challenges in addition to school closures, including the death of loved ones and economic hardship. “Students have been exposed to a tremendous range of experiences, ranging from traumatic to enriched”, says educational psychologist Sara Rimm-Kaufman, PhD, a professor of education at the University of Virginia.

While some students have thrived and learned during the pandemic, others are likely to have fallen behind. Regardless of ZIP code or family background, schools are, in theory; places where all students can receive education and support. But the coronavirus shutdown has emphasized (and widened) existing disparities in education.

“When kids come to a classroom, it’s easy to imagine they’re all the same. But we can’t expect the same outcomes from a kid learning on his own computer at his family’s vacation home and a child who doesn’t even have a table to sit at, “says Avi Kaplan, PhD, a professor of educational psychology at Temple University.

But the experience may yet have a silver lining, he adds. “We have a tendency to go back to what we thought was normal. But there’s an opportunity here to unlearn things that people knew were not working.”

• The digital device

When schools closed abruptly, teachers were forced to design remote-learning plans quickly. The plans they created were all over the map, says Helenrose Fives, PhD, a professor of education foundations at Montclair State University and president of APA’s Div. 15 (Educational Psychology). In late March, Fives and colleagues began surveying teachers about their experiences with distance learning in New Jersey- a state with a staggering 584 school districts.

“It seems like every district is doing something different. The variability in how districts are approaching this is shocking”, she says.

Even within a single district, student experiences are wide-ranging. Teachers and parents have reported that some kids are thriving with fewer social distractions, or have been energized by their newfound independence. Yet many other children lack devices or reliable access to the internet. And while some families have parents who can oversee their children’s remote learning,many youths are caring for younger siblings while their parents work in essential jobs or living with the chaos of unemployment or homelessness.

“It’s a question of privilege”, says Michele Gregoire Gill, PhD, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Central Florida. “Some families are just in survival mode.”

The inequities are hard to overstate, Gill and other experts say. A survey of 1.500 U.S. families by advocacy group ParentsTogether released in late May found 83% of children in families in the highest income quartile were logging in to distance learning every day. Just 3.7% of those families reported their children were participating in distance learning once a week or less, compared with 38% of students from families in the lowest income quartile.

That missed instructional time is likely to be a serious setback for low-income students. Previous research has found that chronic absenteeism – usually defined as missing at least 10% of school days – affects reading levels, grade retention, graduation rates and dropout rates (Allison, M.A., et al., Pediatrics, Vol. 143, No.2, 2019). Chronic absenteeism disproportionately affects kids living in poverty in the best of times, as Children’s National Hospital pediatrician Danielle Dooley, MD, and colleagues describe in an opinion piece on the effects of COVID-19 on low-income children (JAMA Pediatrics, published online, 2020). Remote learning during COVID-19 is likely to widen that disparity, they say.

Students from low-income homes aren’t the only ones at risk of slipping through the cracks. Families who speak other languages, undocumented immigrants and studentes with special needs are also at risk of missing out on the services to which they’re entitled. Children with disabilities or special needs are legally entitled to special education services, including speech-language therapy, autism interventions, occupational therapy and psychological services. But many of those don’t translate easily to the remote platforms available. The ParentsTogether survey painted a grim picture for special education students, with 40% of parents reporting they weren’t receiving any support, and just 20% reporting their children were receiving all of the special education services they typically received in school.

• Does remote learning work?

Students from disadvantaged backgrounds and those with special needs may face the biggest educational challenges. But some research indicates that all students could start the year far behind. Megan Kuhfeld, PhD, and Beth Tarasawa, PhD, of the Collaborative for Student Growth at the educational nonprofit organization NWEA, published a white paper analyzing past research on learning loss over summer break. They predict that overall, students in grades three through eight will return to school with roughly 70% of the learning gains in reading and less than 50% of the learning gains in math compared with a typical year (The COVID-19 Slide: What Summer Learning Loss Can Tell Us About the Potential Impact of School Closures on Student Academic Achievement, Collaborative for Student Growth, 2020).

That’s not to say online learning itself isn’t effective. “Research generally shows that online learning can be as effective as in-person instruction, if you have a good setup”, Gill says. But what most schools were doing in the spring wasn’t true online learning, she adds. “Teachers didn’t have prepared online content, so they were trying to convert what they normally do to an online platform. It was emergency triage.”

“Remote learning is not the same as online learning”, agress Aroutis Foster, PhD, a professor of learning technologies at Drexel University. True online learning happens on digital platforms designed for that purpose, often with personalized content for each student and options to use their choice of digital tools. “Online learning facilitates different types of learning preferences, provides learner flexibility and uses online quality metrics”, Foster says. But many students, distance learning during COVID-19 included none of those features, and instead involved tuning in at a set time to listen to teachers lecture on Zoom or Google Meet.

Connecting lessons to children’s interests is especially important in remote settings where students don’t have the classroom structure to guide them.

What’s more, online learning programs that were working before coronavirus might not be as effective without teacher support and the structure of in-person learning. In a data tool called the Opportunity Insights Economic Tracker, economists at Brown University and Harvard University looked at how U.S. students were performing in an online math program before and after the coronavirus shutdown. As of May 31, total student progress in online math coursework decreased by 64.2% compared with January. In low-income ZIP codes, math progress fell 74.8%, compared with 36.1% in high-income ZIP codes.

• Successful Learning Environments

With continued remote learning a distinct possibility, educators will be considering what went well during the spring of 2020, and what they can improve on. Educational psychology offers clues about what factors are important to creating successful learning environments. To stay motivated when learning at home, students need to feel competence, relatedness (a sense of belonging and connection with others) and autonomy, says Kaplan. According to self-determination theory (Ryan, R.M., & Deci, E.L., American Psychology, Vol. 55, No.1, 2000), those needs are vital for self-motivation and well-being in many domains, including education. In a practice brief for parents who are homeschooling during quarantine (Homeschooling Under Quarantine, APA Div. 15, 2020), Kaplan and Debra A. Bell, PhD, describes how parents can support a child’s competence (emphasize improvement with realistic expectations), relatedness (consider a child’s needs, listen empathetically and provide emotional support) and autonomy (provide meaningful choices and allow a child to incorporate personal interests).

Tying lessons into children’s own interests may be especially important in remote settings, Foster says, when students don’t have the classroom structure and classmates behaviors to guide them. “Online settings require a lot of self-regulation, and we know novice learners don’t have a lot of that”, he says. “Peer influence is a huge deal in terms of learning, and there’s a lot of socially shared regulation happening in classrooms.”

The lack of social connections during the pandemic is significant, says Rimm-Kaufman. “One of the things that this shift has underscored is how much personal relationships matter for kids, including relationships with other students and with teachers.”

Feeling connected to a teacher can make a big difference in educational outcomes. The quality of teacher-student relationships has a significant effect on student engagement and, to a slightly lesser degree, on student achievement, according to a meta-analysis of 99 studies (Roorda, D.L., et al., Review of Education Research, Vol. 81, No.4, 2011.) The influence of those relationships was particularly important for students from disadvantaged backgrounds and those with learning difficulties.

But meaningful teacher relationships may be harder to develop over the internet, says Fives. “So much of the motivation in a classroom comes from those quick interactions students have with teachers in the moment”, she says. “In a remote-learning setting, kids often have to wait for that feedback.”

What’s more, digital interactions can be highly taxing, Kaplan says. In person, teachers and students learn a lot from the mood of the classroom and subtle body language. In a video, it’s harder to discern those details. “Online, much of that information is missing, so our brains try to fill in the gaps. And that takes working memory”, Kaplan says. “At the same time, students might see their own image, which can raise their self-consciousness and is an added burden while trying to focus on learning.”

Learning new technology has also presented a challenge, Fives adds. “It’s not just writing an essay. It’s figuring out how to post it to get the feedback from the teacher.”, she says. Older students might have to learn different platforms for different classes, she adds. “Every teacher might be using different tools, and that puts a heavy cognitive load on students.”

• Learning losses and teacher burnout

Given so many hurdles – known and unknown – educators will have to be flexible as the new academic year begins, Foster says. “It will be an atypical year, and there will absolutely be a lot of catching up.”

An important next step will be to figure out how best to assess students’ knowledge as they start the new year, RimmKaufman says. “Some kids will come in having lost months of instruction, so educators will have to make broader assessments than they usually would, and find ways to adjust their instruction accordingly.”

That is a daunting task, though not an insurmountable one, says Francesca López, PhD, an educational psychologist and the Waterbury Chair of Secondary Education at Penn State University’s College of Education. “Teachers do remarkable work, and I don’t believe for a second this generation of students won’t catch up”, she says. “But we can’t allow everything to rest on teachers. Policies must change to ensure equity.”

In the short term, López adds, educators will have to attend to students emotional well-being to help them learn. Millions of families have experienced unemployment and financial hardship, and many children have lost loved ones to COVID-19. “This is a traumatic event, and we need to prioritize mental health”, López says. “We can’t focus on academics without considering the whole child.”

Teacher mental health, too, is a top priority, experts say. At the end of March, Marc Brackett, PhD, founder of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence at Yale University, and colleagues surveyed more than 5.000 U.S. teachers, asking them to list the most frequent emotions they felt each day. The top three: anxiety, fear and worry. “We found (educators) are more anxious than ever before, and they’re struggling to manage their anxiety”, Brackett says. “The uncertainty and unpredictability about what the future of school will be is taking a toll on their wellness.”

Teachers aren’t just learning new platforms. They’re also worrying about student well-being more than ever before and having to figure out how to reach out to them from their own homes. Plus, says Rimm-Kaufman, “many schools emphasize teacher collaboration, and those efforts are strained when teachers aren’t in the same building with one another.” It’s unsurprising that many teachers experienced stress, burnout and self-doubt as they taught in such unprecedented circumstances in the spring, Fives adds. “Many really good teachers don’t feel like good teachers anymore. Their identity as a teacher is affected, and their self-efficacy is crashing.”

• Investing and Innovating

Administrators face an uphill battle as they find ways to support teachers and get students back on track. School budgets are vulnerable to shrinking state revenues due to the pandemic, and some school districts have already laid off employees. In May, school superintendent from 62 cities sent a letter to Congress asking for new federal education assistance. “Significant revenue shortfalls are looming for local school districts that will exacerbate the disruption students have already faced”, the letter warned.

Still, some experts are hopeful that this experience could be the shake-up that schools needed to improve education for all children. Educational disparities will be hard to ignore in the wake of the pandemic, Kaplan says. “Crises often sharpen our gaze and reveal aspects of our lives that were masked or ignored. This highlights the need for prioritizing equity at the policy level.

“We’re shifting into the unknown”, Lopez says. “Education psychology has a robust history of learning theories. As this unfolds, we need to look to the research to see what we can incorporate it into high-quality education.”