Poster #230 - Students Show Less Progress on Online Learning Program Before and After Recess

• In Event: 3-206 - Poster Session 13
  In Poster Session: PS 13 Section - Technology, Media & Child Development

Integrative Statement

Introduction: Given the time elementary school students need to prepare for today's high-stakes standardized assessments, some school districts are curtailing time reserved for less academic pursuits like recess. However, research suggests that recess provides the break necessary for school-aged children to maximize their learning (Pellegrini & Bjorklund, 1997). However, other times of day have not been studied as extensively. As students shift to spend an increasing amount of instructional time engaged with digital technologies (Schwirzke et al., 2018), it is unclear whether these patterns would generalize to online learning. The combination of playing outside (Focht, 2009) and engaging with stimulating screen media (Singer, 1980), may be overly arousing in a way that impedes learning.
Methods: In the current study, we compared performance on an online literacy platform from a sample of 481 children in grades PreK-5 at four different time periods: 1) an hour before recess (5304 logins), 2) an hour after recess (7789 logins), 3) morning school day not adjacent to recess (7568 logins), and 4) afternoon school day not adjacent to recess (2380 logins). The online platform is a component of a blended learning program that combines personalized online instruction with teacher-led lessons and tasks to promote literacy. We used login-level data, allowing us to investigate the relation between time of day and performance for each learning session.
Results: We ran linear mixed-effects models predicting three performance measures (units completed, minutes on task, total attempts to complete units) from each login with fixed effects for time period and random effects for students nested within classrooms nested within grades. We also included fixed effects to control for student-level variation, such as total number of units completed yearly. We found that time period predicted additional variance in all three models. Generally, we found that students were more productive during logins occurring during the school day but outside of the hours surrounding recess. For example, on average students spent 18 minutes on task during periods not adjacent to recess and about 15 minutes on task during the hour before or after recess. A specific contrast of the hour before and after recess was marginally significant, with students completing more units after recess.
Discussion: Our research has implications for teachers looking to administer educational software. Children seem to make more progress in a single learning session when that session is not directly before or after recess. This conflicts with other research on more traditional learning situations, where children show stronger learning directly after recess (Mahoney & Fagerstrom, 2006). It may be that the combination of recess and screen time is overly stimulating to children in a way that impedes learning (Zillman, 1980) or that children are simply slow to log in to computers to begin learning after recess or quick to log out when recess is their next activity. Further research would benefit from work that directly compares how timing relative to recess affects performance on different types of educational experiences, including online, paper-and-pencil, and group work.

Authors

• Kayleigh Ryherd, University of Connecticut
  Presenting Author

• Lisa B Hurwitz, Lexia Learning
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sarah Franzén, Lexia Learning
  Non-Presenting Author

• Nicole Landi, University of Connecticut
  Non-Presenting Author

• Emily B Myers, University of Connecticut
  Non-Presenting Author