Potential Points of Intervention

Parental Involvement

We found correlations between income level and fluency in English and further found that parents who are not fluent in English are less likely to attend parent-teacher conferences or other school meetings — engagements that are crucial for the parent, teacher and student. These environmental nodes pose a potential intervention point for our team if we can find a way to simply bridge this gap in communication.

Student engagement/increasing knowledge of school concepts

We found that student engagement makes a positive feedback loop with student knowledge: as students engage more, they learn more, and by learning more, they are more willing to participate due to greater confidence (they believe there is a lower chance that they will embarrass themselves due to a wrong answer, and they are less afraid of being judged because they are more confident in themselves anyway). Because communication skills also improve as confidence increases and as students practice communicating by participating in class, both these nodes are potential points of intervention.

Nonverbal Communication Skill

Nonverbal communication skill has an important impact on a child’s early social development, and it can predict the quality of personal and professional relationships throughout a child’s life. NVC development is impaired by a heightened number of chronic stressors in a child’s environment. Low income students on average have a much higher number of chronic stressors, which makes the nature of this problem cyclical. Although more research about this is needed on our part, NVC affects the income level of employees, so people who grew up in poverty are less likely to get a high paying job, partly due to a deficit in NVC.

Quality of Remote Learning During COVID-19

This node really gives our problem relevance. Research is surfacing showing the benefits in-person learning and thus how crucial it is we improve current remote learning schools or transfer back to in-person as quickly as possible. Namely, the social interaction among children in grades K-12 is important not only for emotional wellbeing, but also for children’s language, communication, social, and interpersonal skills. Additionally, there is a significant gap in the quality of remote learning by income level. In fact, low income students are likely to lose up to 5 months of learning more than their higher-income peers, setting them further back during these troubling times.

Remote learning has directly impacted the communication skills of K-12 students. For example, specialists have noted that from having less conversations with others, children have shown more hesitance and signs of anxiety when it comes to interaction. Special needs children have had even greater setbacks, as therapists have noted that some have lost speech skills that required hours of therapy sessions to build up.