Online Experimentation during COVID-19 Secondary School Closures: Teaching Methods and Student Perceptions

Abstract

The COVID-19 lockout situation affected people all over the world. Despite all of the disadvantages, this situation offered new experiences and perspectives and pushed education advances forward as never before. Something that seemed to be unreal became a worldwide reality within a few days. Instructors of all subjects at all educational levels moved to a virtual environment instantly. Higher education institutions, universities, and colleges seemed to be fairly prepared for this situation. Unfortunately, primary and secondary schools, especially in eastern and central Europe, never considered distance education as a valuable alternative before, so they did not have software, hardware, and staff prepared for such a situation. Moreover, students’ expectations and dilemmas concerning e-learning were not investigated earlier in the context of obligatory subject education. Moving to the virtual environment was particularly challenging for teachers, who wanted to transfer real class experiences into online lessons since chemistry is based on problems, observations, evidence, and experiments. Often, teachers claimed that they could be more efficient if they had knowledge, skills, and proper equipment to run classes online. This paper presents experiences of secondary chemistry teachers from Slovakia, participants in the IT Academy Project, who earlier, within the framework of the project, were equipped with the necessary skills and tools to run virtual classes, supported with data logging experiments. In this communication, the teachers’ efforts using online experimental practices are described, as well as reflections by their students about the experiences.

Effects of COVID-19 on the academic performance of Afghan students’ and their level of satisfaction with online teaching

“…Unlike this finding, a study conducted by Abuhassna et al (2020) has reported that students had highly satisfied with online teaching. To consider the overall level of satisfaction with online teaching, several studies have been found in line with the findings of the present study (Aristovnik et al, 2020;Babinčáková & Bernard, 2020;Bauk et al, 2014;Bokayev et al, 2021;Bolliger & Wasilik, 2009;Chen et al, 2020;Durak, 2020;Fatani, 2020 2020; Mahdy, 2020bMahdy, , 2020aMalkawi et al, 2021;Nguyen, 2016;Di Pietro et al, 2020;Shahzadi & Ahmad, 2011;Sharma et al, 2020;Surahman & Sulthoni, 2020).…”

What virtual laboratory usage tells us about laboratory skill education pre- and post-COVID-19: Focus on usage, behavior, intention and adoption

“…In 2020, usage statistics of August and September compared to June and July month may be attributed to the usage of virtual laboratories in the curriculum for conducting online laboratory education in Indian universities. With the plethora of challenges facing in education sector post COVID-19, similar studies were also reported on transformation of traditional classes to online delivery considering potential impacts on learning experiences on student communities (Babinčáková & Bernard, 2020 ; Gamage et al, 2020 ).…”

What do secondary school students think about experimental practices in science lessons taught in distance education?

“…The student found experimenting more motivating and fun and social in terms of learning the concepts better, and they claimed that not being able to experiment was the biggest deficiency. Babinčáková & Bernard (2020) determined in their study on online chemistry experiments with students that students found these activities instructive. On the other hand, another point that students criticize in distance education is that teaching is carried out with teacher-centered questions and answers and traditional approaches are mostly used (Koçoğlu & Tekdal, 2020).…”