Reopening schools: How online learning impacts child development

When students learn from home, they miss out on instruction from one of their best teachers: Their peers.

Children learn from watching each other and from modeling what they see other children doing, said Andy Lopez-Williams, president and CEO of ADHD & Autism Psychological Services and Advocacy in Utica. That's a huge missing piece in remote learning, he said.

"Learning is a social endeavor," Lopez-Williams said. "If it weren't, we wouldn't do it the way we do it."

That's one of the many reasons why school districts are working so hard to bring students back into the buildings this fall.

But safety concerns -- and the difficulty of finding enough space and staff in schools for proper social distancing, routine COVID-19 screenings and other safety measures -- means that the majority of local students will return to school, at most, on a part-time basis.

Many, whether through parents' choice or their district's reopening plan, will continue to study fully remotely.

But all districts are ready to pivot back to all-remote learning should the COVID-19 pandemic get worse.

"I think it's critical (to get students into classrooms)," Lopez-Williams said. "When we talk about any typical kid, any of us, we tend to learn much better when we're in a rich, experiential learning environment."

Developing routines, relationships

There is research supporting the importance of hands-on learning and having children be active participants in the learning process -- something that's much easier in a classroom setting, said Nicole Scienza, internship coordinator for psychology-child life at Utica College who has researched children through age 8.

In addition, school provides socioemotional benefits as students forge relationships with their teachers -- relationships that help them get questions answered and information clarified. That process is much easier in a classroom setting, she said. Students build relationships with their peers, which is particularly crucial at younger ages, Scienza added.

"It's really important for them to learn their social/emotional skills, which certainly in an online environment is going to be more difficult," she said.

The quality of social relationships ends up having a tremendous impact on the course of people's lives and even on the length of their lives, Lopez-Williams pointed out.

Students learn, with intervention from teachers, how to work through conflicts, but conflict doesn't come up nearly so much in online classrooms, Scienza said.

Lopez-Williams also said school teaches students the life skills they will need as working adults, such as how to get up and get dressed in time to catch to bus or how to get their supplies ready to take to school the next day.

Classroom learning also offers more structure and routine than most remote learning did during the spring.

"Children thrive on having expectations and structure and routines that they can depend on," Scienza said. "The difference between online versus being in school -- it's a different structure."

Each type of learning can have its own routines in place. This fall, teachers have had a lot more time to set up structure and routine than they had last spring, she said.

The loss of schedules and patterns of classrooms isn't felt equally by all students, however.

There are a number of students who are more likely to struggle with remote learning, Lopez-Williams said. This includes students with learning difficulties -- from trouble with math or a hard time learning to read -- as well as memory, attention or socioemotional impairments, he said.

Studying at home requires executive function so students can tune out minor distractions and only get distracted by important disruptions, he said. Students with neurodevelopmental disorders that affect executive function, such as ADHD, are at a disadvantage, he said. In school, teachers and the classroom environment help students exert some executive function, but at home, they don't get that same help establishing that control, he said.

In addition, it is hard for teachers to give students with autism, ADHD, developmental or intellectual disabilities or other special needs the extra attention they need in a subtle way that doesn't the single student out, Lopez-Williams said. The situation can create time management issues for the teacher and privacy and self-esteem issues for the student, he said.

Pre-school hurdles

Some pre-schoolers -- especially those on the autism spectrum -- definitely have struggled with too little routine in the home environment since school closed, said Toni-Anne Johns, director of early child autism services for Upstate Cerebral Palsy, which has a pre-school program.

Children struggl with the lack of structure and rules that suddenly changed. Home no longer is just the place to watch TV and play on a tablet, but also where instruction takes place. As such, kids face new expectations, Johns said.

"Home is home. Home is where you get to relax and take it easy a little bit," she said.

Normally, teaching the ABCs, numbers, shapes and colors in the pre-school program serves as background for teaching more fundamental skills such as how to sit and listen to the teacher without touching each other, she said.

"It's all of those other classroom skills, the other skills they need to be successful at learning the ABCs," Johns said.

Some children with special issues could create a particular issue during the pandemic if they refuse to wear a mask, either because or sensory issues or disruptive or aggressive behaviors, Johns said.

"How do you mitigate that?" she asked. "I don't know. I don't know that there's any answer. But these issues are real."

Benefits of distance learning

On the other hand, home still is, in many ways, a "natural learning environment" for preschool children, Johns said.

Remote learning is helping to bridge a gap so that children apply what they learned in school to home more often than in the past, she said.

There are even some children who might benefit from remote learning, such as those who learn best by watching or hearing things (and can watch lessons a second time at their own pace), or students who are easily distracted by their neighbors in a classroom, Scienza said.

Perhaps the pandemic has created a new tone, helping people to accept that humans can't control everything, Lopez-Williams said.

"It sort of slowed things down a little bit for us," he said. "My kids, who in a normal school day, would go to school, come home, maybe talk to each other a little bit, are getting along much better these days."

Parental commitment

One difficulty with remote learning has been that parents have been forced to step into the breach, helping children despite their work schedules, other child care commitments or gaps in their own knowledge.

Relying on parents is particularly dicey when students have special needs because the parents, either through genetics or through the stress of caring for a special-needs child, are likely to have their own issue, Lopez-Williams said.

"Now you put that pressure on that parent to be the main leverage point to educate that child," he said.

All parents have had to step up a little to try to make sure children stay active and engaged in a world without school or extracurricular activities, Scienza said. Without that extra parental involvement, children are less likely to get things done, she said.

As parents have gotten more instruction, though, on how to care for special-needs preschoolers at home, they've felt more empowered as they better understand how to help their kids, Johns said.

"They have a better understanding of what we're doing all day," she said.

The long run

Districts are hoping to phase in more classroom time for more students as the school year progresses.

Nevertheless, everyone needs to keep an eye on kids, Scienza said.

"I think it's just making sure that teachers and parents, administrators, everybody is just recognizing that children, their lives, everything is going to look different to them," she said. "To them, the more rules and expectations we place on them (regarding COVID-19) ... the more we do that, the more likely behavior challenges are going to pop up."

Adults need to validate that children are worried, scared and upset and make accommodations for them, she said.

Lopez-Williams hopes to see plans to make up for the time and opportunities children have lost -- especially children with special needs.

"You can't make this up," he said. "The window of opportunity to help them is closing as long as this goes on -- where they're forced into remote learning or even a part-time remote learning environment.

"I suspect that a decade from now, we'll be still seeing the effects of this."

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