In December 2019, a new infectious coronavirus disease, COVID-19, was first identified in in China. In order to curb the spread of this disease, some 192 countries around the world have imposed a quarantine in March 2020 and subsequently closed all educational institutions. The first closure of all educational institutions in Slovenia took place on 16 March 2020. Yet learning has not stopped, and has instead moved online. Conventional education has been interrupted and the period of remote schooling has begun. Without consistent and clear guidance on how education should be organised during this period, schools and teachers have undertaken a journey into the unknown. Physics lessons are usually based on experiments and physics classrooms are mostly full of the tools to carry them out. However, with the move to remote schooling, teachers had to work with what they had at home. They had to find alternative formats to replace experimental work and to change and adapt their teaching methods, formats and pace, as the learning environment and dynamics online are completely different from those in the classroom. At home, students also had to adapt their environment to make it suitable for learning. Both students and teachers were placed in a new situation and faced many challenges in a short period. All of this may have had an impact on the knowledge and understanding of physics of secondary school pupils, which was the topic of this master's thesis.
The main objectives of the study were to determine to what extent distance education during the COVID-19 pandemic affected Slovenian high school students' knowledge and understanding of physics, and to identify the content topics that Slovenian high school students lack understanding of after remote schooling.
A quantitative survey was carried out using a convenience sample of 167 students from all over Slovenia who attended 1st, 2nd or 3rd year of school in the 2019/20 school year and who have been schooling remotely from March 2020 onwards. The data was collected through an online knowledge test. For each year of study, a knowledge test was set up, which included 20 optional physics tasks, which are translations of the Croatian Matura tasks. The data obtained was edited and analysed based on different criteria. The data was compared with the data obtained from previous Croatian Matura examinations.
Results showed that Slovenian students who were distance learners for part of the 2019/20 school year were generally less successful in solving the tasks than students who solved the Croatian Matura tasks. It appears that no meaningful conclusions can be drawn about the performance of the tasks in the examination in relation to the period of the substantive topic covered by the task. However, the results show, which content topics were, covered most by distance education students and which content topics Slovenian students have a lack of understanding of after receiving remote schooling. These topics should be given the most emphasis in the future organisation of physics education.
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