Elementary students in Canada experienced a substantial disruption to in-person learning over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in fewer students meeting grade level requirements, less curriculum being taught, and overall, more students falling behind. These adverse learning outcomes have been further exacerbated by recent funding cuts in the education sector, increased class sizes, and a reduction in available educational assistants. As such, teachers are being forced to do more with less. Our solution is the School of Health Studies (SHS) LEARN Lab: A community engaged learning (CEL) partnership between the 400 students in HS 2700 and elementary school teachers across Canada with the goal of creating tailored open-access electronic health-related resources to support teacher’s needs.
Our mission is two-fold: (1) to integrate experiential learning into a second-year undergraduate course in SHS; and (2) to create an open-access resource repository of short, evidence-based, developmentally appropriate, and engaging health resource videos requested by elementary school teachers from schools across Canada. To achieve these objectives, HS 2700 students will learn the fundamentals of child and adolescent development and apply this learning to the resources requested by a teacher. Students will work alongside a group of peers to research, develop, and create the resource with ongoing feedback from the teacher partner, and publish the resource for teacher use. Teachers will identify the need for and provide details regarding specific resources, respond to student questions, provide feedback on the resources, use the resources in-class, and share these amongst their networks. The repository will grow year to year, with an estimated 200 resources being added yearly, and will remain open access for use by any teacher.
To assess the well-established evidence-based positive impacts on the quality of instruction when community engaged learning is used, and to evaluate the ongoing impact of the SHS Learn Lab for teacher partners, course-based and intervention-based evaluations will be undertaken.