The Impact of the COVID-19 Lockdown on Parents and their Adolescent Children in Relation to Science Learning.

With the transition to distance-learning at the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, several countries required parents and their children to remain at home, under lockdown. Many parents found themselves taking on additional responsibilities regarding their children's education. However, children do not always interpret their parents' intentions as they intended. This study investigated this complex relationship, showing that parents' emphases regarding science learning changed during the first COVID-19 lockdown and in parallel, the relations between these emphases and their adolescent children's goal orientation and self-efficacy toward science learning also changed. In 2019, one year before the COVID-19 lockdown, the children's mastery and performance orientations toward science, and their self-efficacy in science were significantly correlated with their parent's attitudes toward science. In 2020, shortly after the end of the first COVID-19 lockdown, these relations remained significant, but in addition the parents' emphasis on performance became a significant predictor of the children's mastery and performance orientations, and of their self-efficacy in science. A small increase in the children's performance orientation and self-efficacy in science was seen, and only a small decline in their mastery orientation toward science. These findings contrast with what the literature indicates is typical at this age, when there are no lockdown conditions.

Shifting from Face-to-Face Instruction to Distance Learning of Science in China and Israel During COVID-19: Students' Motivation and Teachers' Motivational Practices.

Science teachers in many countries were required to shift from face-to-face (F2F) instruction to distance learning (DL) during the COVID-19 pandemic. With the aim of helping science teachers learn how to support their students in negotiating such shifts in the future, we used an online motivation survey based on achievement goal theory to investigate the shifts to over two thousand 8th grade students' perceptions of their science teachers' motivational practices and their own goal orientations towards science that occurred during the transition from F2F instruction to DL in two very different countries, China and Israel. We hoped to identify issues common to both countries, assuming that these issues might be relevant to other countries as well. Factor analysis, t-tests, and multiple regression were used to identify key teacher motivational practices, changes to these practices and to students' goal orientations, and relations between teacher practices and student goal orientations. The major predictor of students' mastery orientation towards science in both F2F instruction and DL, teachers' attentiveness to their students' need to understand, declined for students in both countries during the shift from F2F to DL, and was associated with a decline in students' mastery orientation, engagement, and enjoyment.