Pandemic Lessons: How Teaching will Transform Post COVID-19

An average student today can be struggling with a lot of things– from trying to keep a balance between staying safe and maintaining a normal life, to feeling scared, depressed, and worried about his future, to feeling a bit lost and angry. It’s worth pondering upon the ways to support them through the pandemic and how instructors can best educate their students during these tough times.

Challenges faced by students during Pandemic

Students entering colleges have been affected not only academically but also emotionally. Students have been less optimistic about their first year of college. They struggle with COVID on many levels.

• They have to stay apart from one another as per the guidelines to maintain distance. Many students are required to have constant COVID testing, in some cases, it’s 2-3 times a week.
• Some have been forced to transition to online learning.
• Their relationships have suffered a lot - among students, between students and faculties, and between students and their families. Moreover, the support system offered by the universities and colleges have been very strained and some may argue are not adequate for the present moment.
• One of the underlying causes of the difficulties faced by the students as most of them are in their late teens or early 20s and studies show that their brains are not fully developed at this age. Hence, students can be very sensitive to the potential rewards of risky choices. They may experience greater difficulty in exercising self-control and their risky behaviour also peaks during this phase.

The social restrictions have seen a rise in mental health issues amongst the students. Many students are now facing mental health challenges, hopelessness, sleeplessness, inability to concentrate, loneliness, depression as well as mental and emotional exhaustion.

The US centres for disease control and prevention conducted a study for 18–24-year-old to understand if they have experienced any sort of mental health problems. Almost three-quarters of the respondents said that they experienced some sort of adverse mental or behavioural health symptoms. The most troubling part was that 26% of those survey respondents said that they seriously considered suicide. Substance abuse also increased significantly during the pandemic. So, the problems that are being experienced by the students are not trivial, instead, they are affecting them in profound ways including their academic performance.

It has been observed that the mental health issues that exacerbated and came to the fore during COVID-19 were not new. They were the result of the long-term underlying challenges such as anxiety disorders and academic distress that the students had been facing over the last 6-7 years. The increase in mental health issues is the continuance of a troubling trend. This had seriously affected the academic performance with almost 22% saying that they experienced impaired academics and it grew more during the pandemic.

At every stage, poor students were hit the hardest as the racial and socioeconomic disparities were exacerbated:

• Higher levels of stress were observed in people of colour.
• Internet access was more limited for students living in poverty, especially the students who had to switch to online learning during pandemic faced greater difficulty.
• There were differences in the availability of adequate hardware.
• Physical spaces to study were less available and limited.

Today, one of the biggest questions hinges on whether the students will experience rebound post-COVID-19 and its answer is not certain. Students have faced various challenges including financial struggles which may continue for many learners. Some students are already dealing with grief and trauma as they have lost family members and friends. The learning loss is a big hindrance to future academic performance. The data shows that there was a 31% increase in emergency room visits for mental health crisis in 12 – 17-year-olds.

Amidst all these challenges, Dr Robert Feldman suggests everyone to focus on the silver lining:

1. We now have the tools to address the problems brought on by the pandemic including the tools that come from learning science and academic pedagogy. Moreover, now we are more confident than ever to address these challenges.
2. Many, if not all, students are rising to the challenges they face.
3. Learning science can help us find solutions.

What is Learning Science?

It’s a multidisciplinary field focusing on how people learn, and how they can learn better. It focuses on the science underlying learning, teaching and educational practice. It’s a very broad and diverse discipline, one that encompasses psychology, data science, cognitive science, sociology, anthropology, and more. It draws on a diverse array of methodologies, including adaptive learning, machine learning, and data analytics. The common thread to the work of learning scientists: they take a scientific approach to understand educational processes. Learning Science provides evidence that innovation work guides the development of future innovations.

Learning Science is already changing the face of education. It provides evidence-based answers to educational questions. Some examples include:

• Are you primarily a visual, auditory, tactile/kinesthetic learner?
  The Science: There is no evidence that learning styles are related to learning abilities.
• Do most people only use 10% of their brains?
  The Science: We use 100% of our brains all the time
• Do video programs like Baby Einstein promote brain development in infants?
  The Science: No evidence that showing videos to young infants leads to anything but later decrements in attentional abilities.
• Are digital natives exceptionally good at multi-tasking?
  The Science: Although they think they’re good at multi-tasking, they really aren’t better at it.

Five key principles of instruction drawn from learning Science for a Post-COVID world:

1. Good teaching is good teaching.
   The medium of teaching whether it’s online or face-to-face has proven to be less important than the quality of the instruction itself. The way instructors teach is less important than applying what they know about good teaching. The most important aspect is to apply the principles of good teaching. The traditional format of teaching wherein an instructor stands in front of the class and lectures the students for 60-75 mins without a break is considered highly ineffective in today’s time. This format doesn’t work in a face-to-face classroom, and certainly not in an online classroom.
2. Active learning that promotes student engagement facilitates student success.
   This can be achieved by making the material more meaningful and relevant to the students’ goals by personalising it. The use of interactive tools like video clips, polls etc along with a quick reply to their queries, promotes learning and involvement. It’s a good practice to provide multiple opportunities to the students to engage with the material through discussions, questions and debates.
3. Opportunities for student-student and student-instructor interaction is a central component of student success.
   It’s essential to support students’ relationships and connections with others by creating an environment of care. One of the ways to encourage interaction is by making assignments that require students to work with their classmates: synchronous short-term projects, peer instruction, collaborative brainstorming, discussions and debates. The instructors can promote student-instructor engagement by making themselves accessible to the students. This can be done formally through office hours and personalised feedback or informally through social media interactions. Any method that allows students to engage with their instructors as human beings and not just as an instructor, is considered important and greatly supported by learning science.  
4. Teach students how to be successful: good students are made, not born.
   No one is genetically programmed to be good students or bad students. Instructors can help their students in becoming good students and there are several ways to achieve that. They can help students to become agile learners and train them to transfer their skills from one setting to the other. Instructors must provide direct instructions in study skills specific to their course topics like effective reading, test-taking and listening strategies. There is very good research data showing that students who are specifically instructed in study skills are more effective learners and perform better. It’s important to teach soft skills to the students, including etiquettes like writing to an instructor and behaviour over a zoom call. Once again, Learning Science supports direct instruction to students that can help them become successful.
5. Use technology to personalise the delivery of material.
   Today, college students embrace technology to a great extent. Instructors have developed ways in which technology can be personalised to address students’ specific needs and concerns. Adaptive technologies produce significant improvements in persistence, retention, and graduation rates. We have very good evidence that this approach works including McGraw Hill’s Connect® – An adaptive learning solution.

Conclusion

• The COVID pandemic has presented exceptional challenges, both to students and instructors.
• Learning Science provides us with practical solutions that can increase students’ success in significant ways.
• In the long term, the adoption of innovations now will pave the way for long-term, post-COVID improvements in education.

The content of this blog has been extracted from the webinar conducted by Robert Feldman, where he shared the challenges faced by students in the pandemic, learning science and how instructors can use technologies such as Connect® to teach online. You can watch the webinar here.

About the Author

Dr Robert Feldman is a Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences and, senior advisor to the chancellor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the chair at McGraw Hill learning Science Advisory Board.

Dr Feldman has held several positions as the Deputy Chancellor of the university, dean of the college of social and behavioural sciences and interim dean of the college of education. Feldman also has served as a Hewlett Teaching Fellow and Senior online teaching fellow. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, and the American Association for the advancement of science.

He was the winner of the college outstanding teaching award and recipient of a Fulbright senior research scholar and lecturer award. In addition, he was president of the Federation of Associations in Behavioural and Brain Sciences (FABBS) Foundation and is now a member of the FABBS board.