The Covid-19 Pandemic has caused massive problems around the world. Once issue that has resulted from the pandemic is how children have been effected when learning at home. In the article Wakefield et al. (2018), is was found that, "gesture helps learners learn, but not merely by guiding their visual attention." The pandemic brought online learning to many children and students around the globe had to adapt to a new learning environment. according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, eighth-grade scores fell in 49 of the 50 states, with math being the subject being the most affected. Wakefield's research on the importance of gesture learning is directly related to this heighten emergency for learning. In The New York Times article (written by Sarah Mervosh) "Pandemic Learning loss" elaborates how students have been set back years due to remote learning environments. Mervosh explains "in Ohio, researchers found that districts that stayed fully remote during the 2020-21 school year experienced declines up to three times greater than those of districts that mostly taught students in person." This connection to in-person gesture learning and online class could have drastic effects for students at all levels.
In Wakefield et. al (2018), the main findings highlighted that children watching their instructor use hand movements better help allocate their instructor use hand movements better help allocate their visual looking patterns. First, It was found that "children look more to the problem and gesture space and are better able to follow along with ambiguous instruction." The second main discovery was that there is a complex relationship between gesture and visual attention in which gesture moderates the effect of visual looking patterns on learning." Wakefield's findings are very relevant today in explaining the cause of lower math scores resulting from the pandemic. Wakefield during her experiments also used math as the main focus of learning for the children being subjected to testing and used an eye tracker to show where their focus would attend to. Mervosh emphasizes that out of all the subjects math was the subject that was affected while reading seemed to show no correlation to online learning environments. Mevosh a the end of her editorial explained that a big difference in learning was seen with how socioeconomic status was the biggest factor to decline in learning. Harvard and Stanford researchers found that two school districts of different wealth, rich vs poor, had differences in their scores. Both the schools were "spending roughly the sam amount of time attending classes remotely, students in the wealthier Cupertino district actually gained ground in math, while students in poorer Merced City fell behind." There is of a course a larger context to declining scores, but is interesting how Wakefield's work on visual learning patters could be
small detail in a bigger story of Covid-19 pandemic.
The changes in behavior that came about from the Covid-19 pandemic have already caused drastic problems around the globe. Learning for children and students has been disrupted and has shown short effects already. Time will tell if the long term effects will lead to a less educated population that already struggles with attention. The power of the online learning has its positives with being flexible, but the human behavioral factor will be severely altered. Learning is directly connected to a behavior which is the base of Wakefield's findings. The Covid-19 pandemic has only widen the gap of school inequities and the loss of in-person learning has severely affected the ability for students to learn.
The New York Times Article: Pandemic Learning Loss
Research Article: Wakefield E, Novack MA, Congdon EL, Franconeri S, Goldin-Meaddow S. Gesture helps learners learn, but not merely by guiding their visual attention. Dev Sci. 2018 Nov;21(6):e12664. doi: 10.11111/desc.12664.Epub 2018 Ape. 16 PMID:29663574; PMCID: PMC6191377.
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