Examining neural mechanisms of developmental dyslexia from infancy to school-age (supplement)

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PROJECT SUMMARY The closure of educational institutions worldwide due to the COVID-19 pandemic is estimated to have affected over 90% of the world's students. Pandemics and resulting school closures are often studied from only a public health perspective, leaving questions about the academic implications of school closures. The COVID-19-related school closures have been proposed to be viewed through the lens of seasonal learning loss observed during the summer months, but it is unclear whether these two types of school closures lead to similar learning losses. Children from lower socio-economic (SES) backgrounds as well as children with learning disabilities, who both show larger declines than their peers during the summer, may be most affected by COVID-19 school closures. The goal of this supplement is to continue data collection for the existing parent grant in order to collect crucial data essential for the longitudinal growth curve and developmental trajectory analyses.Data collection has been significantly delayed due to COVID-19 closures and restrictions but will resume on April 1st 2021. We aim to quantify the degree of learning loss in children with and without a familial risk for developmental dyslexia using in-person behavioral testing and a remote assessment protocol recently developed in our lab. The existing longitudinal design of this project provides a unique opportunity to compare language and (pre-)reading skills across several timepoints prior to COVID-19 school closures. The literacture on school closure related learning loss show that learning loss due to summer and natural disaster related closures is compounded by poverty and home literacy environment and practices (HLEP). HLEP has been shown to be directly related to (pre-)reading skills such as decoding abilities and phonological sensitivity and evidence indicates an association between HLEP and literacy attainment. When controlling for SES and parent education, children from richer HLEP backgrounds outperform children from poorer ones on vocabulary, oral listening comprehension, and reading skills. The implementation of eWork policies during COVID-19 may allow caregivers to contribute more to their children's educational attainment – but they also have to juggle work with homeschooling, childcare, and other stressors, which may lead to reduced literacy activities. In this supplement, we will further analyze a data set already obtained from families enrolled in the parent grant as well as a global community sample of 1,400 families that examines how HLEP of families has changed since the pandemic. It is of great importance to determine how family and SES factors (e.g., changes in household income, number of caregivers in the home, number of eWork hours) influence HLEP during COVID-19 restrictions and after these restrictions are lifted. By analyzing language and (pre-)reading skills longitudinally before and after COVID-19 school closures, and linking these to HLEP and SES, this proposal has the potential to quantify learning loss and inform the design of assessments and interventions addressing the decline of reading and language skills due to COVID-19 closures.