Learning in a pandemic : primary school children’s emotional engagement with remote schooling during the Spring 2020 Covid-19 lockdown in Ireland

Open Access funding provided by the IReL Consortium. This study was funded by UK Research and Innovation-Economic and Social Research Council and the Irish Research Council under the ‘ESRC-IRC UK/Ireland Networking Grants’. The Children’s School Lives study, on which this analysis is based, is conducted by University College Dublin and funded by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment through a grant awarded to Dympna Devine, Jennifer Symonds, Senaeen Sloan, and Gabriela Martinez Sainz.The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the greatest disruption to children’s schooling in generations. This study analyses primary school children’s emotional engagement with remote schooling during the Spring 2020 lockdown in the Republic of Ireland, which involved one of the longest school closures among rich countries at the time. It investigates whether children’s engagement with their remote schooling varied by personal and family characteristics, using data from the Children’s School Lives (CSL) surveys. CSL is a nationally representative study of primary schools in Ireland, which collected information from children aged 8–9 years in May – August 2019 and in May – July 2020. Linear regression estimates with school fixed effects are based on the analytic sample of nearly 400 children (from across 71 schools) who took part in both waves and have complete data on all the key variables. Emotional engagement with schooling is measured using child-reported items on satisfaction with schooling. Everything else being equal, children who reported higher engagement with schooling before the pandemic were more engaged with remote schooling during the lockdown. Although there were no significant differences by family affluence, children with greater resources for home schooling reported higher levels of engagement. This includes having a computer or a laptop for schoolwork, having someone to help with schoolwork if the child is worried about falling behind, and having schoolwork checked by a teacher. This points to the paramount importance of adequate digital technologies in the home as well as the availability of help during periods of remote schooling.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Experiences of remote teaching and learning in Ireland during the Covid-19 pandemic (March–May 2020)

Initiated in 2018, Children’s School Lives is an exciting, longitudinal study following 4,000 children in 189 schools through their primary school years. Children’s lived experiences and voices are at the heart of this research. The report, Experiences of Remote Teaching and Learning in Ireland During the Covid-19 Pandemic (March – May 2020), is the second publication arising from the study and focuses on children’s experiences and those of their teachers, principals and families, during the period of school closures earlier this year. The report highlights the important role of education and primary schools in children’s and families’ lives. It also spotlights the centrality of relationships in primary education, those between children and their teacher, between teachers and parents, and relationships between teachers and school leaders. The rich, authentic voices throughout the report give us insights into the many challenges that emerged out of the need to reconfigure and reconceptualise teaching and learning in the context of a global pandemic. This saw primary schooling being relocated from a shared physical space, the classroom, to an online environment, necessitating enormous work, engagement and commitment by study participants—children, parents, teachers and school leaders—to enable teaching and learning to continue. The report also affords us glimpses of how this changed learning environment impacted, positively and negatively, on children, their families, teachers and school leaders.University College DublinNational Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA

Children's School Lives in Junior Infants

This report is the third in the series from Children’s School Lives, an innovative, longitudinal research study involving almost 4,000 children in 189 primary schools. One of the defining features of the study is the strong emphasis it places on listening to and learning directly from children about their experience of being in primary school in Ireland. This particular report introduces us to the youngest children in the study. The multiple perspectives gathered from the children themselves, their families, teachers and school principals, converge to provide us with a rich, detailed picture of the children’s first year in school. Uniquely, this period incorporates the months just prior to the arrival of the Coronavirus on Irish shores and the weeks immediately after the commencement of the first national lockdown in Spring 2020. Early childhood is a time of being and becoming, a time which provides important foundations for children’s learning and for life itself. We know from research that the first six years of a child’s life, their early childhood years, are particularly important for their holistic development. We also know from research that a positive transition from preschool to primary school is a predictor of children’s future success in terms of social, emotional and educational outcomes. Yet, despite this knowledge, relatively little research exists in the Irish context on children’s initial experiences in primary school. The Children’s School Lives study responds directly to this research gap by capturing, through multiple voices, comprehensive insights into the children’s initial weeks and months in their primary classrooms.National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA