No abstract

No abstract

Schools have been closed in many countries due to the on-going COVID-19 pandemic, but education continues online. Little is known about how parents cope with educating their children in this unprecedented situation. Here, we present the results of a rapid survey examining the experience of Czech parents of children in Grades 1-9 (Age ~ 6-15; N = 9,810) with respect to education at home during the COVID-19 lockdown. This survey was distributed widely, but only online and parents participated voluntarily. Mainly families with an internet connection and interested in their children’s education (i.e., the majority of families with school-aged children in the Czech Republic) took part in the survey. The results show that these families tend to cope well with the current educational situation and view the overall schoolwork transferred to homes as useful. Most children spend 2-4 hours a day studying, while parents help them at least half the time. Parents mostly explain task instructions, check the work their children have done, and teach new topics. To a lesser extent, they help their children solve tasks. Teachers appear to assign tasks more often than they provide feedback and/or interact with children. Some parents face difficulties, but those are generally not severe. These include, most notably, a lack of time, issues with technologies, and inadequate teaching skills and content knowledge. Altogether, this work maps the current educational situation in a large segment of Czech families and highlights possible pitfalls to be avoided: in the Czech Republic and beyond.

Schools have been closed in many countries due to the on-going COVID-19 pandemic, but education continues online. Little is known about how parents cope with educating their children in this unprecedented situation. Here, we present the results of a rapid survey examining the experience of Czech parents of children in Grades 1-9 (Age ∼ 6-15; N = 9,810) with respect to home education during the COVID-19 lockdown. This survey was distributed widely, but only online and parents participated voluntarily. Mainly families with an internet connection and interested in their children's education (i.e., the majority of families with school-aged children in the Czech Republic) took part in the survey. The results show that these families tend to cope well with the current educational situation and view the overall schoolwork transferred to homes as useful. Most children spend 2-4 h a day studying, while parents help them at least half the time. Parents mostly explain task instructions, check the work their children have done, and teach new topics. To a lesser extent, they help their children solve tasks. Teachers appear to assign tasks more often than they provide feedback and/or interact with children. Some parents face difficulties, but those are generally not severe. These include, most notably, a lack of time, issues with technologies, and inadequate teaching skills and content knowledge. Altogether, this work maps the current educational situation in a large segment of Czech families and highlights possible pitfalls to be avoided: in the Czech Republic and beyond.

It is widely agreed that the traditional process of schooling can benefit from the usage of computers as supportive tools. Of various approaches using computers in education over the last decade, e-learning and edutainment have become the most prominent. Recently, a number of authors have criticised these approaches arguing that they conserve traditional 'drill and practice' behaviouristic methods of teaching instead of enhancing and augmenting them. It has been proposed that a 'paradigm shift' is needed and that this shift may come through utilizing all the advantages of full-fledged video games, so-called digital game-based learning (DGBL). However, several case studies reported serious problems with the DGBL. Among the most notable issues are the lack of acceptance of games as an educational tool, problems with integration of games into formal schooling environments, and the so-called transfer problem, which is the problem of the inherent tension between game play and learning objectives, the tension that mitigates the ability of students to transfer knowledge gained in the video game to the real-world context. Here, we present a framework for an augmented learning environment (ALE), which verbalises one way of how these problems can be challenged. The ALE framework has been constructed based on our experience with the educational game, Europe 2045, which we developed and which has been implemented in a number of secondary schools in the Czech Republic during 2008. The key feature of this game is that it combines principles of on-line multi-player computer games with social, role-playing games. The evaluation which we present in this paper indicates the successful integration of the game and its acceptance by teachers and students. The ALE framework isolates key principles of the game contributing to this success, abstracts them into theoretical entities we call action-based spaces and causal and grounding links, and condenses them in a coherent methodological structure, which paves the way for further exploitation of the DGBL by educational game researchers and designers.