In December 2019, the infectious coronavirus disease (COVID-19) broke out globally. Due to the declared epidemic all educational institutions closed in the second half of the 2019/20 school year. This affected the organization, planning and implementation of educational processes in the school. Teachers and other school professionals had to switch to distance education in a short time and adapt their work. In teaching physics experimental work is particularly important. Therefore, teachers had to use different methods and forms of work. These kind of changes in the learning environment affected the knowledge and understanding of physics in primary school. In the conducted research, we identified (1) the extend of knowledge and understanding of physics of students who were partially educated in COVID-19 circumstances and (2) the learning topics that students lack after a period of distance education. The research was carried out with a knowledge test, which was solved by 188 students who were in the 8th and 9th grade of primary school in the 2019/20 school year. For each generation we have prepared a set of twenty assignments from the past national knowledge tests of physics. The obtained data was processed and analysed according to various criteria. Furthermore, it was compared with statistical data of tasks from national knowledge tests of previous years. The results revealed that the students who were involved in distance education during the 2019/20 school year were generally less successful in solving tasks compared to students who solved tasks in the national knowledge tests in previous years. We identified the learning topics that students had lack of understanding after a period of distance education and the ones that most students discussed at a distance education. We found that we could not reasonably conclude about the success of solving tasks in the knowledge test depending on whether students discussed individual content set of the task before or after distance learning, during distance learning, did not discuss the content or do not remember it. Additionally, we identified the learning topics that need to be given more emphasis to in further education.
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