Learning and teaching during Covid-19 and beyond: educational psychology perspectives

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on learning and teaching. When the pandemic started, school closures were implemented in 188 countries upending learning and teaching among more than 1.7 billion students and their families (OECD, 2021). This represents 94% of the learners worldwide from pre-primary to higher education (United Nations, 2020). The negative effects of COVID-19 are immediately instantiated in potential learning loss (Kuhfeld et al., 2020). However, the pandemic also impacts a wide range of other important outcomes beyond cognitive losses. Declines in motivation and engagement as well as impaired well-being may ensue. Recent studies have revealed that wellbeing problems and other mental health issues have tripled during the pandemic (Kumar & Nayar, 2021; Torales et al., 2020). The deleterious effects of the pandemic are likely to persist and have negative implications for students, parents, teachers, and other educational professionals as the world lives with the virus. Though the COVID-19 pandemic has caused the largest educational disruption in recent memory, the psycho-educational impacts of the pandemic are still largely unknown. This special issue aims to understand the learning, teaching, and well-being implications of the pandemic as well as to provide evidence-based solutions to these key problems that are grounded in rigorous scientific research. This special issue has two parts, with Part 1 focusing on issues of learning and teaching and Part 2 focusing on well-being. Part 1 includes six papers covering a wide range of countries including China (Hong Kong SAR), Finland, Germany, Norway, and South Korea. The first paper in the special issue is a conceptual review by Fong (2022), who examined five prominent theories of academic motivation—social cognitive theory, situated expectancy-value theory, self-determination theory, attribution theory, and goal orientation theory. He clarified the mechanisms that could impact students’ motivation during times of transition and upheavals and proposed an integrative model–Motivation Within Changing Culturalized Contexts Model—that emphasised the role of contextual and cultural factors in shaping student motivation. The paper situated student motivation within broader instructional, social, future-oriented, and sociocultural/racial dynamics. Fong paid special attention to minority students who experience systemic racism and discrimination as the pandemic laid bare systemic inequalities. These experiences of racism and discrimination could negatively impact students’ motivation towards school. The paper ended with implications for educational practice, that may help educators in supporting students’ motivation during challenging times. Fong’s contribution highlighted the necessity of synthesising contextually sensible motivational frameworks when studying the complexity of human motivation. Such models could inspire educational psychology to be more explicit in acknowledging its applicability during changing times and across different sociocultural contexts (King et al., 2018; Korpershoek et al., 2021). The second paper by Fostervold et al. (2022) surveyed almost 9,000 university students from Norway during the first months of the COVID-19 lockdown in Norway. The universities