Cyber School for Grandparents: an Intergenerational Educational Program

Overview

Social participation and social relationships are relevant aspects of older adult's psychosocial well-being. In this regard, specific interest is devoted to Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) which enable to connect people and to support their social participation. Despite the number of older Internet users constantly increased in the last decades, older adults still display reduced Internet access compared to younger generations. Italian elderly people are severely penalized by this "gray digital divide". The pandemia due to COVID-19 spread has exasperated the situation, leading to the paradox of having people putatively most beneficent of use as those most excluded, due to scanty of competencies and of suitable and agreeable learning occasions. The Cyber School for Grandparents is an innovative intergenerational educational program aimed to bridge the digital divide by training secondary school students (aged 15-17 years) to become cyber tutors for their grandparents. The intervention will take place during the 2021/2022 school year, as part of the curricular activities of 3 classes at the local Human Science High School. The intervention was designed to be personalized and inclusive, in order to meet the need of each student-senior dyad, regardless of their starting digital skills and attitudes toward technology. The primary aim of the present mixed-method feasibility study is to qualitatively evaluate students' participation and learning throughout the course and to measure grandparents' pre-post changes in mobile device actual use, self-reported proficiency and attitudes. Secondly, eventual pre-post changes on aging stereotypes and psychosocial well-being of the participants will be explored.

Systematic reviews of qualitative studies on older adults ICT users highlighted that the principal drives for use were the desire to keep in touch with family and friends and to enter into intergenerational communication, whereas main obstacles are their distrust in terms of perceived utility, privacy concerns as well as technical difficulties. As regards the learning context, old persons prefer to rely on their own social network to acquire digital competence and spontaneously refer to their younger family members that may act as "warm" experts on ICT use. ICT use among older adults may thus be favored by properly designed educational interventions, focused on their interests, needs and concerns about technology. The educational program will be delivered to 3 classes of the local Human Science High School. Students will be asked to involve at least one grandparent willing to participate in the initiative. To assure the active participation of the entire classes, if some students were not able to involve any grandparent, community-dwelling older adults would be enrolled among those participating in ongoing studies at the Golgi Cenci Foundation. Compared to the previously reported intergenerational programs on ICT use, the present initiative shows relevant innovative features: the educational lessons will be embedded in the students school program instead of being offered on a volunteering basis, the students will independently plan and implement the cyber sessions for their grandparents outside the school as extracurricular activities and, whenever possible, the program will involve familial dyads. The course is composed of 3 different modules: theory (2 lessons), method (2 lessons) and practice (6 lessons). Theoretical lessons will deal with the aging process and its effect on cognition and learning process, issues and peculiarities of older adults ICT use, andragogy and strategies to favor the learning process of new skills. During the methodological lessons, students will be instructed on the importance of data collection for research purposes and on the specific features and administration modalities of the assessment tools to be compiled by their grandparents. In the practical module, students will be guided in the implementation of the one-to-one cyber sessions for their grandparents, which will be then conducted independently during extracurricular hours and customized according to the needs and interests of each senior involved. Pre-post outcome measures will be remotely collected both for students and for seniors. Assessment will be performed through online surveys shared within the web-based platform adopted by the school to perform remote lessons during the COVID-19 pandemic (Google Classroom). All the instruments selected are suitable for self-compiling both by young students and older adults. The students will help and supervise grandparents to manage possible technical and/or sensory difficulties with the online compiling procedure. Moreover, students will compile an online diary for each of the 4 practical modules, before the next group lesson scheduled, comprising both an activity and a learning log. The activity log consists of structured questions on the number, frequency, duration, content and modality (in-person or remotely) of the cyber sessions performed with the senior mentee. The learning log will comprise broad guiding questions to reflect on the learning process favoured by the activities and to record the student's observations. Finally, at the end of the experience, students and grandparents satisfaction and opinion on the experience will be assessed using a questionnaire with both close-ended and open-ended questions.