Impacts of Blood Gas Concentration, Heart Rate, Emotional State, And Memory in School‐Age Children with And without The Use of Facial Coverings in School during The COVID‐19 Pandemic

Smith, Jenna; Culler, Airianna; Scanlon, Kelsey

Although researchers from hospitals, universities, and government agencies have concluded that facial coverings (masks) could be one of the most cost‐effective tools to slow the spread of COVID‐19 and accelerate economic recovery (Greenhalgh et al., 2020), parental concern for elementary school children wearing masks is still an issue. Face masks can cause discomfort which may lead to general irritation resulting in potential anxiety and subsequent distraction from instructional material delivered in a school setting (Lee et al., 2005). The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of wearing a facial covering and the impacts on memory, heart rate, oxygen saturation, and emotional state on a 5‐point Likert scale (Buron & Curtis, 2003) throughout 30 minutes of regularly scheduled academic content in students grades K‐5. All participants (N=60) were recruited from the same school and data were analyzed via paired samples t‐tests. There was a trend in students to rate their emotional state as more positive at 0 minutes in the non‐masked condition compared to the masked condition (1.23 ± 0.54 vs. 1.15 ± 0.363; p=0.058). However, vocabulary memory recall was more accurate in the masked condition (8.06 words ± 2.20 vs. 6.72 words ± 2.43; p=0.001). Upon further investigation, this significance was driven by the students in grades 3‐5 (N=27) (9.41 ± 0.80 words vs. 7.85 ± 1.29 words; p=0.001) opposed to students in grades K‐2 (N=26) (6.65 ± 2.31 words vs. 5.54 ± 2.77 words; p=0.12) in masked vs. non‐masked conditions. Heart rate and oxygen saturation fluctuations between the masked and non‐masked students over the 30 minutes of instructional time were nonsignificant (p˃0.05). We concluded that though there were no apparent adverse biological (heart rate and peripheral oxygen saturation) effects on elementary school children while wearing a cloth face covering in the classroom for 30 consecutive minutes of instructional time, there appears to be some cognitive benefit to wearing a facial covering in memory recall for students particularly in grades 3‐5 that warrants further exploration.