Education – Nerdery & Nostalgia

Remote Learning Highlights Importance of Social Connection for Students

Originally published January 14, 2021 for Beacon Media News. Since then, the Washington Post (March 13, 2021) and Teen Vogue (August 28, 2021) have written articles on the same topic, conducting similarly focused interviews, though the latter focuses on how schools will handle mental health going into the 2021-2022 school year.

By Brianna Chu

When school districts were forced to close as COVID-19 arrived in the U.S. last March, students were thrust into an entirely new world of learning. I spoke with four students from elementary school to high school—Altadena Arts Magnet School students Kaidyn Taylor, a fourth grader, and Harry Daniels, a fifth grader; Chandler School seventh grader Vaughn Cross; and Gabrielino High School junior Emily Casciani—to get a snapshot of what school has looked like for them this past year.

While the students learn at different paces and various levels of difficulty as the grades increase, crossovers in experience abound. All four of the interviewed students cited the inability to easily communicate with teachers as one of the main challenges of learning from home. There is more limited dialogue between students and their teachers, since the primary time they spend with their teacher is with the entire class. While teachers do sometimes have designated online office hours, commonly on Wednesdays, there are impediments that come with the solely virtual connection. Kaidyn, for instance, had dealt with the difficulties of not being able to “figure something out but my teacher’s working with somebody else” during the normal in-person school term; however, the biggest problem for her is that “usually, I ask one of my friends for help,” she explains, “but [now] I can’t do that, either.”

*Photo by* *Sharon McCutcheon* on Unsplash

Another significant challenge, especially for Vaughn and Emily, who have higher online workloads, has been maintaining focus and “attention while looking at a screen; it’s much harder than being engaged in a classroom where you can see things happening, watch your teacher, experience the experiments firsthand,” in the words of Vaughn. He uses science as an example: while the experiments have been modified to be reproducible at home, he feels that the experience isn’t quite the same as it would be in school with his class and teacher there.

Archana Basu, clinical psychologist and instructor in the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, describes: “Children generally learn well when actively engaged and in environments where they feel safe and socially connected. While there’s a lot that one can do online—I think there’s been a huge surge in innovation and adaptation—remote learning requires a level of sustained attention and emotional regulation that is a very big demand, developmentally, for kids in middle school and younger.”

Maintaining or creating those social connections has been the most striking challenge for all the students. Whether “it’s talking to friends or having time to talk to a teacher, you can’t just go outside and say, ‘hey, do you want to do this later;’ you have to type on the computer and it takes a long time to respond,” notes Harry.

Getting used to online learning has been complicated for Vaughn, since he switched schools over the summer. He finished his second semester of sixth grade learning at home as a Saint Mark’s School student, and the pandemic certainly factored into his decision of which middle school to attend going forward. Consequently, one of the main factors prompting his choice of middle school was whether he already had friends there. As a new Chandler student, socializing with his classmates hasn’t really happened at all for Vaughn, either. While he’s been able to get to know more of his class individually while completing group projects together, Vaughn comments: “You can only get to know people so much when working on projects. I can say I know them, but do I really know them as friends? On a personal level?”

Even during the school day, recess, lunch, and during after-school arts or sports activities also constitute valuable time for students to spend with their peers, but none of the students I talked to can currently participate in most of their previously-attended extracurriculars: Kaidyn and Harry have been unable to play any of their sports; Vaughn can’t join Chandler’s band or orchestra; and Emily hasn’t been able to continue cheer or speech and debate, though she is still working on her Girl Scouts Gold Award and has joined the Associated Student Body at Gabrielino to be more involved with her school community.

Lack of socialization with friends and loved ones has significantly impacted children across the country. A report published by the Center of Disease Control on November 13, 2020 compared the number of mental health-related emergency room or emergency department (ED) visits among all pediatric visits in 2020 to 2019. EDs are “often the first point of care for children’s mental health emergencies,” and the report found that “beginning in April 2020, the proportion of children’s mental health-related ED visits among all pediatric ED visits increased and remained elevated through October. Compared with 2019, the proportion of mental health-related visits for children aged 5–11 and 12–17 years increased approximately 24% and 31%, respectively.”

And it is in this realm of interaction that video games are winning the pandemic. It’s not just kids that sent the sales of the Nintendo Switch and the newest Animal Crossing skyrocketing this summer—adults in spades went on to sell both the game and consoles out as the game became a method of interaction and online friendship. Online co-op video games of all kinds have become the clear winner for virtual connection for kids of all ages during the pandemic. Harry’s mom Aimee Daniels acknowledges that their rules on video games had been more strict pre-pandemic—“video games only on weekends”—but have become more lenient recently as it’s now the primary way for the kids to interact and even just catch up outside of the classroom, as Harry uses his in-game chat to speak with his friends. Kaidyn and her friends like to call each other and play Prodigy, an educational math game. Mom Jessica Thomas was happy to sign her daughter up for Messenger Kids so Kaidyn could interact more with her friends. “As adults, we [often] don’t think about just how difficult it is for the kids as well,” Thomas says. She definitely sees the difference interaction has, even with her youngest, who’s one. On the days he’s gone to daycare, she’s noticed he’s in a good mood and is ready to go to sleep at the end of the day; but after being home for two to three days in a row, he’s cranky all day. Emily calls and connects with her friends through FaceTime, and they sometimes play online games like the recently popular Among Us together. And in her case, through these games, her social circle actually grew as she met friends of friends whom she had heard of but hadn’t really spent much time with before.

While both kids and parents—and not to mention teachers, too—are inundated by the extra mental and emotional strain of learning and working from home, ultimately, safety is of the utmost concern for all parties. Emily remarks: “I would like to go back [to school] as soon as possible, but I’m afraid of health concerns that would ruin the experience I once had; if it’s harder to be in person for students and teachers, it may not be worth it.” She’s hoping publicity and usage of the vaccine increases, for everyone’s safety—and her concern isn’t misplaced. The Los Angeles Department of Public Health reported the highest spike in the average number of cases per week Los Angeles County School Districts in December 2020.

*Graph from the Los Angeles Department of Public Health*

COVID-19 has affected Emily’s college search, too. Unfortunately, she hasn’t been able to visit the schools on her list, but she has also been changing her list based on how she’s seen different states and schools handle the pandemic. She is undeterred in her desire to attend college, though; her parents have told her about how formative college was for them, and she wants to be able to experience that, too.

However, whenever she does return to school in-person, Emily feels that the biggest change will likely be “gratitude for being able to see people and have people helping me in person, [and happiness] for what I have in comparison to what I have now [in lockdown].” All of the students eagerly await the day it is safe to return to their classrooms and meet and be reunited with their classmates; but for now…maybe it’s okay to cut the kids a little slack for all that time spent playing video games.

Afterword: This wasn’t the original direction I had planned to take this article; in the research I had been conducting prior to the interviews, I was focusing on the statistics relating to reported COVID-19 cases in Los Angeles County schools. However, as with all stories, the real direction comes from the people. After talking to all the students, I realised the real story here was mental health, and the tremendous toll the pandemic was inflicting on kids. And of course, then WaPo and Teen Vogue got onto the topic, too! Kinda cool how it feels like I beat them to the punch 🙂

Overly Dense Article Draft

Originally written 20 June 2021; edited draft published to HeySoCal 24 June 2021.

A Review of New Research on Study Skills and Time Management Benefits

By Brianna Chu

Most parents, students, and teachers will recognise the terms “study skills” and “time management.” These nonacademic skills have often been touted as the keys to improved academic performance. However, not all study strategies are built alike, and there may be more benefits to time management than simply academic performance. This review of two studies published this year summarizes new insights to these familiar terms and may help students and parents use the summer time to prepare and plan for a more effective and balanced school year.

Meaningful study engagement, not total study time, garners better performance

Walck-Shannon, Rowell, & Frey (2021) refer to the “desirable difficulties framework” from Bjork and Bjork (2011), who propose that more challenging studying strategies promote improved long-term knowledge retention. In the past, the two researchers have differentiated between storage strength and retrieval strength; storage strength refers to how deeply entrenched the knowledge is, while retrieval strength refers to how quickly and easily accessible that information is. Bjork and Bjork consequently propose that greater storage strength delays the inevitable knowledge or information loss, and that some “desirable difficulties” in information storage strategies can better cement knowledge. Walck-Shannon et al. hypothesise that the use of more active studying methods, in which students do not repeat previous activities (such as simply reviewing notes or rewriting their original notes word for word) but instead engage with material in new ways, would result in higher performance on exams. The researchers emphasized a technique they refer to as “self-quizzing”, or self-explanation. This learning strategy involves students asking themselves “how” and “why” questions as they learn material, building their own connections between previously learned knowledge and the new information they have been presented.

Within Walck-Shannon’s et al.’s introductory Biology class, students used twelve strategies most frequently, of which six were classified as active, five were classified as passive, and one was mixed (both active and passive). Active strategies included activities such as completing old exams, self-quizzing, paraphrasing class notes, and creating diagrams. Passive strategies included rereading notes, watching lecture videos, and rereading the course textbook. Of the top five most frequently reported study strategies, four were active, while only one was passive.

This use of active strategies by this class is not necessarily typical of most students: overall, they found that their Biology students used self-quizzing more often than students in general (75% versus 10.7% who self-test or 40.1% who use flashcards). Students report preferences for study techniques differently for one specific course than they do for a nonspecific course/studying in general.

Walck-Shannon et al. received feedback on study techniques from 424 out of a total class size of 623, and compared their study habits with their exam results. Unsurprisingly, the most common study strategy was to read over their notes or the lecture slides, a passive strategy. Four main strategies stood out: completing problem sets, self-quizzing, explaining concepts, and attending review sessions or office hours. The latter was considered a mixed strategy, as student engagement can range from actively asking questions to passively taking notes on teacher responses to others’ questions.

Overall, they found that students who used all four of these strategies scored between 4-7.7% higher on average on both tests. While the rest of the most frequently used active strategies only correlated to higher performance on one of the two exams, Walck et al. found that the number of active strategies used by students positively predicted their exam scores. Students who used all six of the main active strategies scored anywhere from 11.1-16.1% higher than students who used no active strategies at all. In short, the more active strategies students employed, the higher their grades were.

Walck et al. also inspected Bjork and Bjork’s (2011) proposal that spacing out study sessions (as opposed to “cramming”) would improve storage strength, a commonly held concept. Interestingly, however, Walck et al. found no significant effect from the total amount of time students spent studying or any significantly better performance from students who started to study the furthest in advance of the exams. No student in their sample studied fewer than two days in the week leading up to the exams, and 64% of students began studying six or fewer days in advance of the exam.

Less surprisingly, Walck et al.’s study confirmed the hypothesis that the more time students studied while distracted—for example, study time in which students multitasked, like scrolling through social media—the worse students would perform. Their students reported distractions during 20% of their total studying time.

These findings suggest that practicing problems, quizzing yourself while learning, and explaining the concept to yourself or others are key study skills to hone for better exam performance, especially for math and science classes. These strategies may still be viable for English and language classes, especially with regard to grammar or vocabulary. Students could also use self-quizzing and explaining concepts for history or social science courses. Walck et al.’s results also reinforce the importance of asking further questions, taking full advantage of office hours or review sessions, or even taking the initiative to contact a teacher or professor directly to clarify challenging concepts.

Less-considered benefits to time management practices

In their 2021 meta-analysis, Aeon, Faber, and Panaccio review the results of 158 studies on time management—from the 1980’s to 2019—to discern not just whether or not time management works, but also whether these techniques are productive and helpful. Concerns that time management mindsets can emphasize a “profit-oriented view of time that perpetuates social [and global] inequalities” and “an inability to enjoy the moment” have been raised by more than just academics, especially in the past decade.

Aeon et al. found that time management had a moderate impact on both academic and work performance, though it seemed to be slightly more effective in academic settings. In an academic setting, time management had a greater impact on behaviour-based performance than results-based performance. In other words, time management skills more strongly affect productive behaviors like motivation and procrastination reduction rather than directly improving GPA. Good use of time management can help students organize their time to better study and complete tasks to better perform on homework and exams, for instance.

The most unexpected result from the meta-analysis found that time management had a more significant effect on wellbeing than performance, either academic or professional. Aeon et al. record that the effect of time management on life satisfaction is more statistically significant than that of job satisfaction. From their review, the researchers have found that time management has most significantly affected previous studies’ participants’ sense of positive mental health and sense of purpose. These findings suggest that time management skills—like setting work-life boundaries, breaking up tasks into smaller goals, scheduling time to complete certain tasks, and deliberately integrating breaks and downtime into one’s schedule—can alleviate stress and improve mental health overall, not just improve work efficacy.

A possible interpretation of the meta-analysis results could be that the purpose for which one utilizes time management strategies matters, especially when used for improving wellbeing as opposed to maximizing profit or optimizing the “grind.” However, concerns about a societal trend towards viewing time as money, and thus using time management as a tool for greater profit or its use to balance an increasingly (and even unfairly) complex workload in the digital world, are still founded and deserving of further evaluation.

Takeaways

From Walck-Shannon et al.’s results, students might take the summer to consider what study strategies they currently rely on most and replace passive strategies with more active ones, like self-quizzing and explaining concepts to themselves and others. Distractions and use of social media while studying produce clearly detrimental effects on academic performance: thus, summer poses a practical time to find ways to minimize distractions while studying, like scheduling study sessions only for as long as students can remain focused or including dedicated breaks, before the school year begins anew.

Based on Aeon et al.’s review, encouraging students to decide on time management strategies that will help them organize their time—balancing academic and extracurricular activities to allow ample opportunities to complete assignments as well as enjoy some deserved downtime—could improve their mental wellbeing during the hectic school year. These time management strategies could include: buying a planner, setting and keeping to a consistent sleep schedule, strategizing the removal of study distractions, and setting goals for the academic school year and strategies to help achieve them in advance (perhaps making a note to set aside more time to study for more challenging subjects, and/or looking into a tutor for that specific subject, for instance).

However, please do not spend all summer planning! Use those time management skills to also set aside time to enjoy being outdoors, spend time with loved ones, and relax before the fall semester.

Works Cited:

Aeon B, Faber A, & Panaccio A. (2021). “Does time management work? A meta-analysis.” Public Library of Science ONE, 16(1). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0245066

Bjork, E. L., & Bjork, R. A. (2011). Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning. In Gernsbacher, M. A., Pew, R. W., Hough, L. M., & Pomerantz, J. R. (Eds.) & FABBS Foun- dation, Psychology and the real world: Essays illustrating fundamental contributions to society (pp. 56–64). New York, NY: Worth Publishers.

Walck-Shannon EM, Rowell SF, & Frey RF (2021). “To What Extent Do Study Habits Relate to Performance?” Life Sciences Education, 20(1). DOI: 10.1187/cbe.20-05-0091.