Around the world, there has been an increasing popularity of online education, especially in secondary and tertiary education. However, in March 2020, the declared pandemic of the new coronavirus disease COVID-19 has induced online education in primary education as well. This is when most primary education teachers have encountered distance teaching for the first time and faced a variety of difficulties in the process. In general education mathematics is one of the essential subjects. In the first grades of teaching mathematics, the use of concrete materials and gradual transition to an abstract level of knowledge are extremely important. Therefore, the process requires a detailed and high-quality preparation. Since there is no way in predicting when the coronavirus pandemic will end, the master’s thesis researches the teacher’s competence to teach mathematics at distance.
The theoretical part of the master's thesis firstly presents mathematics teaching and learning. In the second part, it focuses on information communication technology use, which requires digital competence and plays an important role in distance education. In addition to that, it examines different types of distance communication. Finally, it discusses the pre-assessment and assessment of knowledge in online teaching and learning.
The empirical part of the master's thesis focuses on the of 1st and 5th grade primary school teacher training for online teaching. We explore how teachers cope with the transition from the traditional way of teaching to online teaching during the Covid pandemic. For this purpose, we conducted a quantitative survey among 1st and 5th grade primary school teachers. We were interested in how the teachers assess their competence of teaching mathematics online, which information communication technology they most often use, how they rate communication and how they check and assess knowledge. In order to improve the quality of online teaching, we have developed a manual for 1st to 5th grade teachers. It is based on our research results and deals with the toughest challenges the teachers have to face in online teaching. The practicality of the manual has been assessed by some of the teachers participating in the first part of the research.
The results of the survey showed that 1st and 5th grade teachers today have a greater ability to evaluate their skill of online teaching than they did in March 2020, when they were faced with online teaching for the first time. Teachers state they used a variety of information communication technology, which helped them bring the online teaching quality to a higher level. They worked with online presentation/communication software tools, video websites, and websites for teaching, learning and revising mathematic content. There are two more aspects which need to be taken into consideration while online teaching: a different way of teacher-parent communication, which teachers evaluated as high quality, and pre-assessing and assessing students’ knowledge. The latter was most often accomplished by video conference meetings. The most frequent way of knowledge pre-assessment, however, was checked through photos of students’ work, sent by students themselves or their parents. In the teacher manual, we presented a variety of possibilities of e-learning and e-monitoring students’ work, provided learning materials, as well as examples of teaching preparations, which were said to be the most challenging for 1st and 5th grade teachers. Teachers who reviewed the manual rated it as very well crafted.
Research in the field of online education is important because it is an ongoing situation without a due date. There is no way of predicting when and if the coronavirus pandemic will end and how many more transitions from traditional to online teaching will be made throughout the school year. Teachers will need to be trained in this form of work as well as made aware of the importance of quality lesson preparations, whether they be for traditional or online teaching.
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