Abstract
In early 2020, due to the COVD-19 pandemic, Australian schools were closed and students began an unprecedented time of remote learning. The current study aimed to understand how teachers planned and implemented mathematics learning programs for their students, the challenges they encountered, as well as the degree to which their students were motivated or engaged when learning mathematics at home. Two teachers from two Australian primary schools who shared a similar contemporary teaching and learning philosophy emphasising inquiry-based learning were interviewed, and students were surveyed anonymously about their engagement (cognitive, emotional, social and behavioural) when learning mathematics from home. Findings indicated that both teachers were concerned about effectively catering for all students and assessing student progress and engagement with the tasks. Survey data revealed most students displayed positive engagement with remote learning experiences, except for the lack of opportunity to learn mathematics with and from their peers.
Highlights
Most of 2020, schools in Victoria, Australia moved to learning from home (‘remote learning’) due to COVID19 restrictions
Informed by the literature related to student engagement, the current study aimed to investigate the extent to which primary students reported being engaged with mathematics when learning at home in contexts where teachers had previously been pursuing inquiry-based learning approaches
Victorian schools were in a unique position in an Australian context, whereby the return to face-to-face learning was followed by a second, longer period of remote learning for all of Term 3 during the second wave of the pandemic
Summary
Most of 2020, schools in Victoria, Australia moved to learning from home (‘remote learning’) due to COVID19 restrictions This was unprecedented and schools needed to make quick decisions about how to best facilitate this, with little time to obtain resources and upskill. Inquiry-based approaches to learning mathematics require studentcentred, mathematically rigorous discussions that are built around students’ experiences of working on tasks Such post-task discussions provide teachers with opportunities to highlight connections between mathematical ideas that emerge (Stein, Engle, Smith, & Hughes, 2008), as well as opportunities for students to learn from one another’s strategies (Russo & Hopkins, 2017). We gathered further insights from the two teachers following the end of the second phase of remote learning, to explore any changes they made and how they responded to the identified challenges
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