Research

Study Explores COVID-19 Impact on Families’ Engagement with Online Learning

Andrew Bacher-Hicks and Joshua Goodman

Andrew Bacher-Hicks and Joshua Goodman, faculty members in BU Wheelock’s Educational Leadership & Policy Studies program, have released a new pandemic-related study in Education Next. Their working paper, “Inequality in Household Adaptation to Schooling Shocks: COVID-Induced Online Learning Engagement in Real-Time,” examines how students and their families adapted to and engaged with online learning as measured by Google search frequencies.

“By comparing changes in online search activity across different geographies, we are able to estimate how COVID-induced demand for online resources varied by a range of geographic and socioeconomic factors, including income, internet access, and rurality,” write Bacher-Hicks and Goodman in their report. The results they found were notable.

Bacher-Hicks, Goodman, and co-author Christine Mulhern, an associate policy researcher at RAND Corporation, found that interest in online learning resources doubled by April 2020. Furthermore, interest in “school- and parent-centered resources spiked, suggesting that increased demand for online support came not only from schools shifting their mode of instruction but also from parents and students seeking additional support as schools closed.”

The study’s findings highlight a significant socioeconomic gap, with searches for school-centered resources increasing more in high-income areas. This suggests that either those areas’ schools are using online platforms more, that those areas’ parents are more likely to engage with online platforms or both. Bacher-Hicks and Goodman hope these results will help policymakers and school leaders formulate more effective responses to the educational disruptions that COVID-19-induced school closures cause.