Educational Technology International

The Korean Society for Education Technology (한국교육공학회)
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Overcoming the Hurdles of Transition: Middle School Students' Engagement in Distance Instruction During the COVID-19 Pandemic in South Korea

  • Received : 2023.03.01
  • Accepted : 2023.04.13
  • Published : 2023.04.30
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Abstract

The study aimed to qualitatively examine middle school students' engagement in distance instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic. The participants comprised 119 students from a girls' middle school in Seoul, South Korea. To gain an in-depth understanding of the students' experiences, we collected their reflective journals, which included structured items about their learning engagement at three timepoints in 2020: April, July, and December. The following are the results: 10 themes and 18 concepts were derived, and they were integrated into causal conditions (sudden transition due to COVID-19), contextual condition (technology readiness, school education context), central phenomena (high level of behavioral engagement, low emotional engagement), interventional conditions (recognizing the potential of online learning, situational awareness about COVID-19 and online learning), action/interaction phenomena (development and use of self-regulated learning strategies), and consequences (changes in practices and perception towards online learning). Based on the findings, engagement patterns of the participants were classified into five types: proactive, conservative, receptive, reactive, passive learners. The present study demonstrated important findings that are essential for the improvement and development of engaging online learning strategies in the future.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea(NRF-2020S1A5C2A04092451).

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