Learning in the COVID Classroom: Insights Gained From Remote Research With Families

• In Event: Moving Beyond "Learning Loss": Drawing Constructive Lessons and Insights From Research During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Objectives
We documented the experiences of diverse families as they transitioned to distance learning during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic. With school buildings closed and widespread shelter-in-place orders, we innovated our methods for doing research with families. Building upon our previous work piloting a remote diary study method (AUTHORS, 2020), we adapted our protocols to the Covid-19 context and recruited 109 families from across the U.S. to a new study. Our research question was: How did caregivers interpret and support the learning they observed at home, and what adaptations did they create from their insights to support their children?

Perspectives
Learning is culturally mediated, anchored in context, and occurs across time and space (Nasir et al., 2020). While valuable, retrospective accounts may mask critical details from past learning moments. Thus, we knew it was important to understand the complex learning happening in homes because of Covid-19 as it unfolded and families adapted to a “new normal” of remote schooling and modified routines.

Methods & Data
Diary studies are a form of experience sampling (Csikszentmihalyi & Larson, 1987) designed to collect real-time, contextualized data on a phenomenon of interest, reducing recall bias. For two weeks in May 2020, we collected daily documentation from 109 caregivers in families with children ages 5-10 using dscout, a remote qualitative research platform. dscout is a smartphone app that allows participants to share multimedia data with researchers directly, including videos, photos, responses to short surveys, and private messages. Our participants were mostly female caregivers (76%) with children in public school (84%), were selected from dscout’s national participant pool, and were equally distributed by household income brackets (<$50K, $50-99K, $100K+). Each caregiver selected one focal child in grades K-5 for the study (53% K-2). We analyzed the data collected through an iterative inductive coding process (Saldaña, 2013), capturing themes that emerged from the data across families.

Results
The data caregivers shared with us provide snapshots of academic, social, interest-driven, and pandemic-related learning moments happening in their homes, the new roles caregivers took up as learning partners (AUTHORS, 2021) as well as insights into their perspectives on learning and pedagogy. Broadly, caregivers reported insights about their child as a learner (e.g., noticings about child’s skills, interests, or ideal working conditions), about pedagogy (both what they saw modeled from school and about their own informal approaches), and also reflected on the source of the insight (e.g., by listening in on instruction or interacting directly with their child.) Insights related to social and emotional wellbeing were common (60%), for example, recognizing their child’s ability to focus, manage frustration, or handle expectations related to completing schoolwork.

Significance
Our work offers a method for conducting large-scale qualitative research remotely with a diverse set of families during difficult times and articulates key insights that caregivers gained from observing and interacting with their children while they were learning from home. These insights highlight the richness of caregiver learning during the Covid-19 pandemic and possibilities for future school-home coordination.

Authors

• Rose K. Pozos, Stanford University

• Brigid Barron, Stanford University

• Caitlin Martin, Stanford University