Remote Learning and Social and Emotional Health

Researchers are still trying to understand how remote learning influences students. Recent work from Angela Duckworth, Rosa Lee and Egbert Chang Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Wharton School, published in the journal Educational Researcher focuses on remote learning by high school students.

Duckworth and colleagues from the Character Lab—a nonprofit she founded and runs that is focused on the science and practice of character development—along with researchers from Temple University and an organization called Mathematica, looked at data from more than 6,500 students in grades nine through 12. Some attended virtual school full-time, others attended in person.

Remote students reported lower levels of social, emotional, and academic well-being, findings that held even when accounting for factors like gender, race and ethnicity, and socioeconomic status.

“There is a thriving gap,” says Duckworth, who is also Director of Education for Penn’s Behavior Change for Good initiative. “On every measure tested we saw a difference favoring kids who were in-person versus learning at home and therefore alone. We’re inferring from this that, all things being equal, teenagers would really prefer to be with each other and with adults like their teachers, not home with mom and dad.”

Collecting these data began long before the pandemic, through the Character Lab Research Network. Three times a year, participants complete a Student Thriving Index, through which they rate facets of their well-being, including how well they think they fit in, whether there’s a trustworthy adult at school, and how interesting they find their classes.

“It’s a way of taking the pulse on how students are feeling,” Duckworth says. “We’ve realized there’s only one way to truly know how teenagers are doing, and that’s to ask them.”

Student participants had completed a February 2020 survey, which became the pre-pandemic baseline. The following survey took place in October; at that time 4,202 students were attending school remotely and 2,374 students were going in person. Because Duckworth and colleagues hadn’t randomly assigned participants into groups, they controlled for whatever variables they could.

For 10th, 11th, and 12th graders, the findings were clear: Those on Zoom school struggled more than peers taking classes in person. For 9th graders, however, the divide between groups was much smaller.

“Maybe 9th graders had never experienced high school before, so their pandemic fall semester wasn’t as influenced,” Duckworth says. “But I think a different explanation, and one that makes sense to us as developmental psychologists, is that the older you are the more you want to separate from your parents. The period of adolescence is when you transition from being a dependent child to an independent adult.”

During the pandemic, researchers have paid a great deal of attention to young children, and rightly so, Duckworth says. But to her, this work shows the importance of closely watching what’s happening to teenagers, too, of paying attention to their social and emotional needs.

Like much about the pandemic, it’s difficult to say whether blips like this will become long-term challenges. Duckworth expects most teenagers will bounce back. “It would be consistent with what we know about adolescent development,” she says. “The most common response to adversity is resilience. It’s the rule, not the exception.” 

Other researchers included Emma Satlof-Bedrick and Sean Talamas of the Character Lab; doctoral student in psychology Benjamin Lira; Temple University’s Laurence Steinberg; and Tim Kautz and Amy Defnet of data analytics organization Mathematica.