Differential Study of the Role of Family in Distance Education in the COVID-19 Lockdown

Abstract

This paper presents a differential study on the way education was delivered within families during the COVID-19 lockdown (spring 2020) in the Valencian Community (Spain). Composite indicators based on responses to a survey for families were used to describe their difficulties (identified as “gaps”) in home-schooling. We also considered traditional indicators of family socioeconomic and cultural level. Taking into account the characteristics of the distributions, we analyzed the results using nonparametric tests (chi-square, Mann-Whitney U and Kruskal-Wallis H). Our findings advocate more work to further identify and define valid composite indicators to describe the contexts in which families operate as an educational setting, in order to use them as covariate variables for family socioeconomic and cultural level in research on factors associated with performance.

Keywords

• distance education
• family
• socioeconomic level
• pandemics
• covid-19