It is still unclear how the COVID-19 pandemic affected children’s cognitive, motor, language, and socio-emotional development. In the present study, we investigated changes in these developmental domains over time and mapped out their multidirectional associations as well as associations with child- and family-level protective factors in a sample of primary-school aged children from socio-economically deprived areas in Germany (N = 428 at T1, N = 412 at T2). Children were assessed at two measurement occasions during the pandemic with a battery of standardized tests. Additionally, teachers provided questionnaires regarding their socio-emotional development, academic skills and nurturing care provided by the family. Changes in children’s performance from T1 to T2 were analyzed. A network-analytical approach was applied to map out networks of conditional associations for both measurement occasions respectively. The main findings indicate that (1) children improved in the language and non-verbal reasoning task and showed lower levels of socio-emotional problems, but performed worse in the executive functioning task at T2; (2) while non-verbal reasoning and receptive vocabulary showed a stable cross-domain association most other developmental domains did not show stable associations; (3) nurturing care and academic skills act as important protective factors, being directly or indirectly associated with better outcomes in several developmental domains. This study illustrates the usefulness of the network-analytical approach in developmental psychology when considering several developmental domains.

Authors:
Birgit Leyendecker, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany
Meryem Demir, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany
Anna Gundlach, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany
Julian Busch, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Birgit Leyendecker is a senior professor at the Ruhr University Bochum, psychology department.

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