What went well, what went badly? Teachers’ and students’ perspectives on remote mathematics teaching during pandemic school closure

Abstract

When schools closed in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, mathematics teachers and their students were confronted with emergency remote mathematics teaching (ERMT). To investigate how they experienced this in the first months, we set up an online questionnaire for mathematics teachers and their students in Flanders (the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium), Germany, and the Netherlands. The questionnaire contained two open items, in which respondents were asked to report on what went well and what went badly during ERMT. The responses of 1599 teachers and 2196 students were analyzed using a theory-based codebook with the code families: teaching practices, didactics, assessment, situational circumstances, and student behavior. Among the main results, we find that both teachers and students report positively on the ERMT teaching practices that student-teacher interaction is an important topic and that teachers struggle with assessment in ERMT. These findings seem in agreement to other research findings. For future research, we recommend monitoring whether these experiences persist after longer periods of ERMT.