Author Interview: Sacha Gómez Moñivas on student learning despite COVID-19 confinement


Using prior academic years as a control group, Sacha Gómez Moñivas and a group of fellow teachers and researchers found that despite the confinement caused by COVID-19, the learning habits of students became more continuous and ultimately led to better scores during assessments. Their study “Influence of COVID-19 confinement on students’ performance in higher education” was one of the highest viewed PLOS publications of 2020 with over 150,000 views. Read our interview with Sacha about his team’s initial response to the surprising results, the importance of providing details to replicate a study and the difficulties in collecting data on student learning.

Would you say this study is outside the scope of your normal research? How did you get involved in this study and why do you believe this research is important?

Our main research line since 2015 is related to new learning methodologies. Within this topic, we study in detail distant learning, among others. When the COVID-19 pandemic forced most of the students stay at home and change their learning strategies, we were completely prepared for this scenario because, by that time, we had already developed different tools and methods of distance learning already applied in our subjects.

We were involved in this study by analyzing and comparing the huge amounts of data obtained in previous years in our pilot experiences applying distant learning with the new data obtained during the COVID-19 pandemic. We were following the same research line as before, but in a new scenario.

This research is important because it is related to the Susta​inable Development Goal 4 of UNESCO. More specifically, this research helps us understand the impact of COVID-19 in education and students’ capability to change their learning strategies. It is also important because COVID-19 pandemic has many specific factors that can interact with the previously detected relevant characteristics of distant learning. For example, does student motivation behave in the same way in the pandemic as in a traditional distance learning setting?

I want to send an optimistic message in this case. We have demonstrated that, even in this very difficult situation, students and teachers were able to adapt their strategies in the learning process successfully

Read Sacha’s article

Did you find the results to be generally surprising, or were they relatively in line with your expectations?

Some results were in line with our expectations since, ultimately, distant learning is distant learning. For example, the limited access to technology by the students is a problem that was well-known before. Of course, it also appeared in the COVID-19 confinement. The problems that appear when preparing assessment tools are indeed also present in the pandemic.

There are, however, other elements that appeared and were a huge surprise. For example, the improvement in students’ performance was unbelievable. We spent a lot of time trying to justify it with arguments related to fraudulent behaviors, such as cheating or copying in different forms. For that reason, we discarded many subjects where we considered that we could not fully exclude the possibility of cheating. After that, we still had three subjects where we could be sure that only confinement was related to the increase in students’ performance.

Your Results state that “the new learning methodology is the main reason for the change in students’ performance during the confinement.” How important is it for leadership bodies at institutions and schools to provide teachers with resources to properly implement new teaching practices adapted for less face-to-face interactions?

It is crucial. The first step for a good teaching practice is having a good communication between teachers and students. If that fails, everything fails. In distant learning, teachers should have good multimedia resources and connectivity, at least. If not, it does not matter the amount of material developed by the teacher or how good the teacher is when explaining a lesson. I have seen a lot of very good attempts of developing new and very well-organized online courses that failed at the very beginning due to not having the adequate resources.

I note that you opted to publish a preprint when you initially submitted this paper for review, and that you published your peer review history alongside your PLOS ONE publication. What led you to these decisions and how important is scientific transparency to you?

We believe that scientific advances must follow FATE principles: fairness, accountability, transparency and ethics. Transparency is, actually, a key factor in the scientific method itself. If a scientific result must be replicable, it should include all details about experimental procedures, materials, etc. Obviously, transparency is a must. In the case of scientific publications, the whole peer review history is very important for two reasons. First, it demonstrates that the article followed a rigorous peer review process. Second, it gives valuable information about the questions raised by the reviewers and how they were answered by the authors, which could lead in additional criticism by the readers, which can be also valuable.

Do you think your study could be easily reproduced in other parts of the world by other researchers interested in using your methodologies, or were there specific pre-existing conditions that allowed for this study to take place? How helpful would it be to have data from classrooms in other parts of the world?

The bigger problem is getting data. There are many factors that must be considered. Because of potential cheating by the students when working at home, we had to discard 80% of our data to be sure that this did not influencing in the study. This is the first and maybe more important problem, but there are others. For example, researchers must also take into account the differences between countries in the sense that different countries faced the pandemic with varying levels of confinement. This is important because conclusions should be related to those conditions.

At the very beginning, when we did our study, not many groups had the opportunity to collect and analyze reliable data. Now, there are more and more very interesting studies from many different countries. Soon we will have enough data to get conclusions about the success of different strategies, which will be very helpful for planning distant learning at all levels in the future.

If the general public were to take one lesson from your study, what should that be?

I want to send an optimistic message in this case. We have demonstrated that, even in this very difficult situation, students and teachers were able to adapt their strategies in the learning process successfully. We are going through some very difficult times, but we have been able to adapt and we must have the courage and energy to continue fighting until we overcome this pandemic.

Thank you to Sacha and his research team for their important work and taking the time to answer these questions. Their work was founded by CRUE, CSIC and Banco Santander.

Citation

Gonzalez T, de la Rubia MA, Hincz KP, Comas-Lopez M, Subirats L, Fort S, et al. (2020) Influence of COVID-19 confinement on students’ performance in higher education. PLoS ONE 15(10): e0239490. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239490

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Resolution Inspiration: What Will You Work on in 2014?

Resolutions 2012 - Flickr - Lori Ann

Though we are well into January, there is still time to set resolutions for 2014. What would you like to accomplish in the next twelve months? For some resolution inspiration, here’s a selection of PLOS ONE research articles to get you started:

Restaurant Bwyty sign by Dave GoodmanLearn a Language

Whether for work or pleasure, learning a new language can be a rewarding experience. It can also take a lot of time. Fear not—according to research published last year, you may be able to learn new words in a foreign language while performing other tasks. The key to this method of vocabulary building is exposure. In the study, participants were given a letter and tasked with finding the letter in a written Welsh word. As they looked for the letter, one group informally heard the word and saw an image of what it represented. Afterward, when participants were asked to determine whether a Welsh word matched an image, those who were exposed to corresponding images and audio scored higher than their counterparts in the control group.

 

Sing Along with Me (10 365) by John Liu

Get Vocal

For those of you with musical aspirations, take a nod from this study on vocal synchronization and rhythm. In it the researchers found that when participants read aloud together in real time, their speech patterns synchronized more readily than participants who read aloud with the recording of their partner’s voice. Though the study was primarily concerned with spoken rhythms, the researchers propose that the social component of rhythm, and the shared goal of synchronization, may be pertinent to music too. Musical rhythm, they suggest, may stem from social interaction rather than sexual selection.

 

smile by jessicahtamDe-stress

Under pressure? According to the authors of this next PLOS ONE paper, those who experience chronic stress may suffer from impaired problem-solving skills. To combat the deleterious effects of stress, they suggest performing a “self-affirmation” exercise before tackling a problem. In the study, the researchers asked underperforming and self-reportedly stressed college students to rank a series of values, such as creativity and friends/family, according to order of personal importance. They were then asked to write about why the top value was most important to them, or why one of the bottom values might be important to others. After completing the exercise, the students were given a word association test. Stressed-out students that wrote about their top value and its personal importance outperformed their peers. Talk about the power of positive thinking!

Whether you want to pick up a new language, reduce your stress, or get out and sing more karaoke this year, we hope you are inspired to try out a few resolutions. For even more inspiration, check out other posts in the PLOS Blogs network: Alessandro Demaio’s Translational Global Health and Peter Janiszewski’s post on Obesity Panacea.

 

Citations:

Bisson M-J, van Heuven WJB, Conklin K, Tunney RJ (2013) Incidental Acquisition of Foreign Language Vocabulary through Brief Multi-Modal Exposure. PLoS ONE 8(4): e60912. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0060912

Bowling DL, Herbst CT, Fitch WT (2013) Social Origins of Rhythm? Synchrony and Temporal Regularity in Human Vocalization. PLoS ONE 8(11): e80402. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0080402

Creswell JD, Dutcher JM, Klein WMP, Harris PR, Levine JM (2013) Self-Affirmation Improves Problem-Solving under Stress. PLoS ONE 8(5): e62593. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0062593

 

Image: Resolutions 2012 by Lori Ann

Restaurant Bwyty sign by Dave Goodman

Sing Along with Me (10/365) by John Liu

Smile by jessicatam

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Sleep May Solve Grammar Gremlins

Beinecke Library

Do you know when to use who versus whom? Affect versus effect? If you’re stumped, first crack open your textbook, but then make sure to get a good night’s sleep – it could help! According to newly published research, sleep plays an important part in learning grammar, and perhaps other complex rules as well.

In their study the researchers used an invented grammar to develop sets of letter sequences. They also assessed each sequence for its “associative chunk strength,” or memorable letter clusters. Sequences with lots of these “chunks” could be easy to memorize, which the authors differentiate from learning, or rule acquisition. Participants were then shown these sequences and asked to recreate them from memory. They were not told that the letter sequences were constructed according to a set of grammatical rules.

The participants then waited 15 minutes, 12 hours, or 24 hours before being tested to see whether they had retained or learned the rules. Participants in the 12 hour group that started in the evening and those in the 24 hour group slept between experimental phases. When the testing began, participants were told that grammatical rules were in use and asked to judge whether letter sequences were grammatical.

Participants that slept between stages, i.e. those in the 12 hour and 24 hour groups, performed significantly better than those who did not sleep prior to the test. Specifically, those who slept between tests were better able to discern grammatical from not-grammatical letter sequences. The same was true for letter sequences with fewer chunks of memorable letter clusters. Their results also indicate that the length of the waiting period, whether it was 15 minutes or hours, did not significantly affect the participants’ performance.

Students, the next time you think you can forgo a good night’s sleep, think again! Sleep may just help you learn those tricky grammatical rules.

Citation: Nieuwenhuis ILC, Folia V, Forkstam C, Jensen O, Petersson KM (2013) Sleep Promotes the Extraction of Grammatical Rules. PLoS ONE 8(6): e65046. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0065046

Image: Childrens talk, English & Latin by Beinecke Library.