Abstract
The relation between academic achievement and various measurements of cognitive abilities, problem-solving skills and self-managed learning has been established in the research before the COVID-19 pandemic and distance learning. The aim of the current research was to analyze the extent to which these aspects predicted the educational achievement of 9th grade students (mean age 15.4 years) during distance learning, when students had to do relatively more tasks independently, organize their daily learning and deal with problems on their own. Relations between self-assessed problem-solving skills, self-management skills, tests of reasoning abilities and the results of diagnostic tests in Mathematics and Latvian were analyzed for n = 256 and n = 244 students, respectively. The results show that: (1) diagnostic test results in Mathematics are best predicted by the parental education level, fluid nonverbal reasoning and verbal reasoning; (2) the best predictors for the results in the diagnostic test in Latvian are parental education, flexibility to change the solution, fluid nonverbal reasoning and verbal reasoning; (3) self-management cannot significantly predict the results of either of the two tests, although it correlates to the results of the tests in both Mathematics and Latvian; (4) only one of the aspects of problem-solving, flexibility to change the solution, can significantly predict results in diagnostic tests. The results confirm the significance of cognitive abilities as an important predictor of academic achievement, as well as the role of parents’ education level. The results also suggest that the flexibility to change the solution, an aspect of problem-solving, might play a role in students’ success in academic tests.
Highlights
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutralDuring the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 1.6 billion children worldwide faced disruptions in face-to-face education, and many schools continued the educational process with distance learning (OECD 2020)
This paper aims to determine the best predictors of diagnostic test results and the extent to which problem-solving skills and self-management skills were able to predict the results of diagnostic tests during distance learning in the pandemic situation, given that they were determined with self-assessment methods, along with cognitive abilities that were assessed with test tasks and parental education level
The fact that the Solution development and evaluation aspect is less related to the diagnostic test results, compared to the Flexibility to change the solution, is worth studying further, to examine if the flexibility in one’s actions during a problem- or task-solving process is crucial to successful problem solving in general, as these results suggest, and to what extent flexibility is related to cognitive abilities and might be taught as a skill and an attitude
Summary
During the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 1.6 billion children worldwide faced disruptions in face-to-face education, and many schools continued the educational process with distance learning (OECD 2020). To many students it was a new situation and their first experience with distance learning, bringing new challenges that could be considered as problems that needed to be solved daily. In. Latvia, a country among those with a high number of days of remote learning, mixed forms of learning were implemented (both synchronous and asynchronous) with online video lessons and with assigned tasks to be done individually at home (Ministry of Education and Science of Latvia 2020) indicating that the ability to work independently was demanded from students. Teachers were forced to swiftly adapt to using new technologies and using pedagogical techniques that worked online, but not all teachers were immediately ready for this: 25% of teachers reported that they had not organized any online lesson in the spring of 2020, when the first remote learning period was implemented, indicating that they had with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
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