Prior home learning environment is associated with adaptation to homeschooling during COVID lockdown

The COVID-19 crisis in 2020 led to exceptional measures to contain the spread of the virus. In France as in many countries around the world, the government ordered a lockdown with school closure for several weeks. A growing number of studies suggest that family socio-economic status might be an important predictor of how families adapted to homeschooling during lockdown. However, socio-economic status is a distal factor that does not necessarily inform on the specific characteristics of the home learning environment that may more directly influence parental adaptation to homeschooling during lockdown. Here we aimed to examine how parental adaptation to homeschooling during lockdown was influenced by prior parental attitudes and expectations towards academic learning, as well as prior familiarity with literacy and numeracy activities at home. The present study involves 52 families who participated in a study about the home learning environment in 2018. At that time, parents completed an extensive questionnaire assessing their beliefs and attitudes towards academic learning and the frequency of literacy and numeracy activities are home. At the end of the first 2020 French lockdown, we again asked the same parents to complete a questionnaire, this time assessing homeschooling conditions during lockdown as well as parental confidence towards academic domains. Over and above a range of background variables, correlation analyses revealed that parental expectations towards academic learning as well as frequency of prior shared activities were related to daily homeschooling time during lockdown. Both parental attitudes and expectations towards numeracy and literacy were also related to parental confidence in homeschooling. Our results suggest that several aspects of the home learning environment may have influenced how families adapted to homeschooling during the 2020 COVID lockdown.