The current study investigated the effectiveness of three distinct educational technologies--two game-based applications (From Here to There and DragonBox 12+) and two modes of online problem sets in ASSISTments (an Immediate Feedback condition and an Active Control condition with no immediate feedback) on Grade 7 students' algebraic knowledge.…

Pandemic-era disruptions to schooling resulted in academic setbacks for many students. To help students catch up, school districts nationwide are implementing a range of academic recovery interventions. In this paper, we use multiple data sources to evaluate the impact and implementation of academic recovery interventions in four school districts…

Schools experienced unprecedented disruptions to instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic, largely driven by the abrupt transition to online learning in the spring of 2020. Often, this shift created a "black box" around remote learning and instruction. However, data generated by educational technology platforms can provide a window into…

Teachers participate in professional learning activities to enhance their pedagogical knowledge and share best practices--and the increasing role of technologies in education, including social media, is shifting how this professional learning occurs. The COVID-19 pandemic provided an opportunity to consider the role of social media for…

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in an unanticipated, near-universal shift from in-person to virtual instruction in the spring of 2020. During the 2020-21 school year, schools began to reopen, and families were faced with decisions regarding the instructional mode for their children. We leverage administrative, survey, and virtual-learning data to…

During the COVID-19 pandemic, some perceptions of Asian Americans in the United States shifted as anti-Asian hate crimes escalated. However, little is known about how these shifting views manifest in K-12 schools. This qualitative case study uses Asian critical race theory to examine how two Southeast Asian American students faced exclusion and…

The schooling disruptions due to the COVID-19 pandemic continue to reverberate across the K-12 educational system more than a year after schools closed for in-person instruction. In this study, we examined the aftermath of these disruptions by modeling student achievement trends prior to and during the pandemic, with particular focus on growth in…

Education has faced unprecedented disruption during the COVID pandemic. Understanding how students have adapted as we have entered a different phase of the pandemic and some communities have returned to more typical schooling will inform a suite of policy interventions and subsequent research. We use data from an oral reading fluency (ORF)…

In this time of global pandemic, there has been much adult discourse around what children need both academically and at home, emphasizing structure and continued learning across content areas. Missing from these discussions and recommendations are the perspectives of children themselves. Children, many of whom lack access to their own…

Exposure to teachers and teaching-related activities is vital for young children's learning. When COVID-19 closed schools, teachers responded with a mix of live- and prerecorded lessons and one-on-one communication with students, which necessitated shifts in planning time. The current study identifies pre-COVID predictors of time teachers devoted…

Long-term school absences during pandemic lockdowns may result in learning gains and losses much like the summer reading loss, but little is known about the actual effects of such lockdowns. This mixed-methods study examined changes in reading enjoyment, amount and resources in three groups of bilingual children--English-Chinese, English-Malay,…

To understand how parents adapted to virtual learning expectations during the initial COVID-19 school closures in spring 2020, this study investigated families' daily activities, including parents' emotions and their appraisals of the value of daily activities across two timepoints. Thirty-two parent-child dyads (Mean child age = 78 months, 50%…

In spring 2020, COVID-19 seismically shifted the education landscape as schooling moved online. We report a small-scale mixed-methods study of how that upheaval affected three-dimensional science learning in elementary school classrooms, and how the situation changed when school resumed, in modified form, in fall 2020. Teachers with experience in…

We conceptualize students' opportunities to learn remotely during the initial school closures associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. We then examine variation in remote instruction using an original statewide survey of teachers in Tennessee, deployed just a few weeks into the closures. Using three-level logistic regression models, we explore…

The aim of the present study was to investigate the associations between parental and teacher support and elementary students' academic skills during the COVID-19 pandemic. Building on data of an ongoing longitudinal study, we studied the roles of children's (N = 63) academic skills before the first COVID-19 lockdown in Germany (March-June 2020)…