Abstract
This contribute investigates how Emergency Remote Education (ERE) impacted families during the spring 2020 Covid-19 lockdown, and in particular, the extent to which the impact of ERE on families, measured in terms of space and equipment sharing, moderates the effect of student and family characteristics on students' engagement. The study derived from the administration of an online survey to 19,527 families with children attending schools, from nursery to upper secondary grade. The total number of student records collected amounted to 31,805, since parents had to provide data for each school-age child in the family. The survey contains 58 questions, divided into three sections, with the first two sections designed to get a reading at family level and the third section to gather data for each school-age child in the family. After verifying the validity of the engagement construct through confirmatory factor analysis, two structural equation models were used to analyze the students' engagement. The main findings reveal how the impact of the ERE on the families has had a significant role in predicting students' level of engagement observed by parents with respect to different predictor variables. Finally, we argue that it is necessary to follow a holistic approach to observe the challenges imposed by the switch of the process of deferring teaching from presence to distance, imposed by the pandemic emergency on families. In fact, a holistic approach can promote student engagement and prevent the onset of cognitive-behavioral and affective problems linked to disengagement in ERE.
Highlights
The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in the early 2020s forced most educational institutions to suspend face-to-face teaching activities and move toward distance learning to contain the spread of the epidemic
In this paper we have examined how the student engagement construct, too often misused, poorly understood, and overgeneralized, during the period of the pandemic emergency is influenced by a variety of factors such as the family environment, the didactic approach and the student attitudes toward the remote learning activities
We found that the perception of interviewed parents about the student engagement depends on their effective presence and support at home, according to working from home practices, or to their school level
Summary
The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in the early 2020s forced most educational institutions to suspend face-to-face teaching activities and move toward distance learning to contain the spread of the epidemic. Not all European countries have adopted the same measures, some have progressively readmitted students to school after the most critical period, others, like Italy, implemented nationwide school closures as of 9 March 2020 until the end of the school year (United Nations Educational, 2021). 33; DPCM 17 May 2020); teaching was provided online until the end of the school year. It is interesting to note that during the period of school closures caused by the pandemic, the focus of many studies has been on what happens when the classroom space-time setting moves into the home environment, introducing the multifaceted world of learning in the digital age into the rhythms of family life (Benigno et al, 2021; Gentile et al, 2021). Scholars and academics worldwide have searched answers to the many research questions raised by the ERE, mainly from the schools’ and teachers’ perspective: how schools and teachers managed the emergency
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