Abstract

In the spring of 2020, face-to-face schooling was abruptly halted in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. This situation warranted that educators and school administrators, across all educational levels, engage in a swift and seamless transition from in-person, onsite instruction and engagement in school activities to remote, home-based settings independent of student and faculty preference for instructional mode (i.e., face-to-face vs. online). The call for this special issue went out in 2021, while some schools were still delivering instruction online. The four studies shared here reflect what we see as work reflecting the ingenuity of the authors to navigate the research process during a global pandemic and to examine the efficacy of remote innovations for fostering learning during the pandemic and beyond.

Keywords: COVID-19, technology, instruction, informal learning

Open Access License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND). This license permits copying and redistributing the work in any medium or format for noncommercial use provided the original authors and source are credited and a link to the license is included in attribution. No derivative works are permitted under this license.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Fran C. Blumberg, Division of Psychological and Educational Services, Fordham University, 113 West 60th Street, New York, NY 10023, United States. Email: [email protected]

In the spring of 2020, face-to-face schooling was abruptly halted amid the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, within the United States, 77% of public schools and 73% of private schools reported moving some or all classes to online learning (U.S. Department of Education, National Teacher and Principal Survey, 2022). Among higher education institutions, 84% of undergraduates reported that some or all their in-person classes were online (Cameron et al., 2021), and 44% of undergraduates were wholly online (National Center for Education Statistics, 2023). Overall, this situation warranted that educators and school administrators, across all educational levels, engage in a swift and seamless transition from in-person, onsite instruction and engagement in school activities to remote, home-based settings independent of student and faculty preference for instructional mode (i.e., face-to-face vs. online). Further, using technology as a mode for conducting all matters of school and everyday business became a necessity rather than an option. Negotiation of this dramatic shift in instructional delivery and the efficacy of that delivery will likely captivate the lay public and researchers for years to come as will the lightning swift preparation of instructors and their charges to engage in remote education on a large scale.

The call for this special issue went out in 2021 when most schools were delivering instruction online. Our goal was to highlight empirical work examining the impact of technology increasingly used to deliver remote formal and informal instruction and to showcase innovative teaching practices that applied technology in potentially novel ways to meet student needs. We characterized “students” broadly to reflect learners of all ages in both formal and informal learning contexts. We hoped to foster an informed discussion and spur future research to ensure that students’ current education and responses to remote education would enhance rather than disrupt their academic progress. Similarly, we sought to feature work that indicated the way forward for research on remote instruction and innovative technology for education postpandemic.

We were aware that at the time of our call for articles, the number of studies meeting our goals would be limited. The four studies shared here reflect the ingenuity of the authors to navigate the research process during a global pandemic and to examine the efficacy of remote innovations for fostering learning during the pandemic and beyond.

Only one of the studies in this special issue considered students and faculty at the higher education level with an emphasis on formal learning activities. In that study, Motz et al. (2022) addressed the efficacy of collaborative technologies within the higher education setting as a vehicle for fostering and maintaining contact among peers and instructors during the pandemic. Findings from multicampus surveys of instructors and students and data gathered via online management systems indicated that the relative quantity of collaborative learning activities during the shift to wholly online learning did not change. However, student and faculty survey responses and student grades indicated academic and socioemotional benefits for the use of these activities during the pandemic, a finding that can be further capitalized on for extant online classroom activities and those that may be shifted online in the future.

Our remaining studies focused on informal learning settings based within the home and during summer camp. For example, Mado et al. (2022) examined the efficacy of virtual reality (VR) applications for remote instruction by surveying and interviewing parents and legal guardians in households where VR was available. Participants reported on VR use among their children and adolescents from April to July 2020. Their responses indicated support for VR as a unique tool to facilitate children’s learning and consideration of events from multiple vantage points. Notably, participants cited the gendered nature of VR that ostensibly favored males over females. Specifically, participants reported that females may have been dissuaded from using VR because of physical discomfort or lack of interest in gaming writ large. Participants also cited difficulties obtaining VR games and content that capitalized on educational content. To help rectify this situation, the authors created a database of current VR games and applications with educational aspects. These findings, and the database authors established, have ramifications for how we consider VR in educational settings as access to it becomes more commonplace and for how we incorporate VR in homes to augment formal instruction.

In an investigation of young children, Putnam et al. (2022) considered how the media characters that young children encounter (i.e., Dora the Explorer, Go, Diego, Go!) might impact their learning. Specifically, these authors compared the efficacy of 4- to 5-year-olds’ learning of the add-1 rule in math (e.g., 2 + 1 = 3) in the context of a math game with intelligent agents that were either the same or different sex as the participant (Dora as the female agent; Diego as the male agent). The game entailed responding via gesture or verbally to a series of math problems; the latter of which was referred to as “math talk.” Findings showed that the gender of the media agent mattered; greater math talk was linked to faster and more accurate responses to the math problem when the agent was the same sex as the participant. This pattern of findings was maintained on a set of transfer problems and highlighted how intelligent agent characteristics might affect young children’s online learning experiences such as those necessitated by the pandemic.

Lane et al. (2022) closed out our suite of studies. These authors questioned whether interest generated in a science, technology, engineering, and math-focused, face-to-face summer camp offered in person could be sustained in a successive year when the camp was offered remotely because of the pandemic. Camp activities were organized around “what-if” scenarios about space science (e.g., What would Earth look like if there was no moon?) in which 10- to 15-year-olds were asked to design these different scenarios in the popular digital game Minecraft. Assessments of participants’ learning were documented via interviews addressing students’ evaluation of their camp experience and science, technology, engineering, and math overall; behavioral logs examining how participants created their “worlds” and observations made as recorded via server; and field notes about, for example, participants’ behavior and affect during camp activities and involvement in camp discussions about their scenario. This rich database was used to make inferences about participants’ engagement in camp activities and interest in science, technology, engineering, and math, which were indeed maintained across both in-person and remote settings. This work demonstrates that youth can be just as motivated in online remote settings when the content and mode of delivery, in this case, Minecraft, are appealing.

In the wake of the pandemic, many more studies have been shared illustrating the effectiveness and limitations of remote learning when options for instructional delivery and social interaction were limited to those online only. Except for one study (Putnam et al., 2022), all work here was conducted amid the pandemic. However, all studies stand as a testament to the ingenuity of researchers and to the resilience of instructors, educators, parents, and students especially when confronting massive upheaval in how learning is presented and received.