In many countries, the attendance form of education was interrupted during quarantine in the spring of 2020 and replaced by some form of distance education. The COVID-19 pandemic has thus tested the preparedness of schools, teachers and educational systems in general to provide various forms of distance education. This paper briefly describes the situation in mathematics teaching in lower and upper secondary schools during the spring quarantine in Slovakia. We focus on the initial reactions and early experience of mathematics teachers. They have used different applications, software and methods in teaching mathematics during this time. Our goal is not to evaluate whether the teachers managed it or not, but what and how they had to do so that the educational process in mathematics would not be interrupted.
The article is focused on monitoring the level of statistical literacy of 9th grade students at lower secondary schools in the Slovak Republic. The results of several years testing of students were used for this purpose. During the reporting period, more than 50 000 pupils from all over Slovakia participated in the testing. In addition to quantitative data analysis, attention is also paid to qualitative analysis of the problems in the field of statistics that were difficult for students. The article presents a part of the results of the research focused on the analysis of critical points in school mathematics.
Besides providing information to pupils, their parents, teachers, and school founders about the achieved level in mathematics, the pupils’ results in mathematics at international or national testing can also be used for other purposes. In our research, the results of Slovak national testing T9 (success rate of pupils and difficulty of individual thematic areas and test items) seem to us to be a reasonable source for identification of critical areas in school mathematics. Based on the findings of such areas, we target more at these areas in the preparation of future teachers of mathematics. The special group of problems, so-called problems with figures, seems to be one of the critical areas. In the assignment of these problems, a part of the input information is not of a purely textual character, and in the process of solving the solver has to read information about objects appearing in the problem and relations between objects from figures (e. g. scheme, graph, chart, table, picture or map). The paper focuses on success rates of pupils in solving problems of this type and on various roles and functions of figures in problems with figures from the testing T9.
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