After much deliberation, we have decided that it is too risky to embark on the intervention as planned during the coming semester. The reason is the uncertainty of how the pandemic may develop and affect schools.
We cannot risk children missing many days of school, either because individual classes or whole schools need to close, or because of absence due to sickness or quarantine. This is because the project is timed to last from January to June, with very little wiggle room for adjustments. If weeks are lost this means that children will not be able to receive the intervention as planned, which will result in diminished benefit for the participating children themselves, as well as in diminished effects that can be analyzed from a research viewpoint. If closures or absences due to the pandemic happen during assessment phases, this means that we will not be able to properly evaluating the outcome of the intervention, essentially having wasted an entire semester’s worth of work.
Thus we have taken the sad decision to postpone the intervention until after the summer, hoping that the pandemic will have sufficiently subsided by then and school life will be back to normal. This means we will start work with 5th grade in the fall, and switch to 2nd grade in spring 2023. In the meantime, we will work on making the best of our pilot data to adjust and improve our materials as much as possible.