The Change of Classroom Situation under Covid 19
Episode 1. The decrease of group activities
Every student watched the television and were separated with their classmates. The left of the figure 1 is the normal classroom setting, including science class, under Covid 19. They were not allowed to do group activities and to share their things with others. These limitations were also applied in science class.
Without Covid 19, students usually had opportunities to operate their experiment with students, and communicated with others frequently. The setting of classroom was different from the recent one. Students usually put their desks together, and had more group activities under that setting. The teacher prepared the experiment tools for every group, and students usually had chances to do experiment with their classmates.
On the other hand, these were not common in science classroom after students had to wear the mask indoors under Covid 19. During the class, the most frequent speech of teachers was absolutely ‘do not be close your friend’, Social Distancing. Some teachers tried to prepare the experiment tool kit individually, but it also had the cons. Students had less interactions with classmates than before.
Episode 2. Not allowed to use science lab in science class
June of 2021, many pre-service teachers came to elementary school for training program. In-service teachers had to open their class for pre-service teachers, but that class had an issue to do that. First of all, science teacher did not open the class due to the private reason, so a homeroom teacher had to open the science class. In addition, students had no experience to take science class in science lab since 2020. To be honest, the class like episode 2 was prohibited nowadays(the right of the figure2) .
A homeroom teacher explained what kind of activities students would do in the next science class via Zoom. That was because students could not come to school everyday under the circumstance of Covid 19. A various type of tools for students were prepared by a teacher, and students did experiment depending on their own hypothesis. During the class, they communicated with their classmates to share their ideas at the level of group. At the end of class, the results of each group were displayed on the monitor via mirroring, such as pictures, video clips, and so forth. That classroom situation might reflect on the dilemma between group activities and social distancing under Covid 19.
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Figure1. The classroom of Episode 1(left). The classroom for science of Episode 2(right).
The Story of Elementary Students
At the beginning of academic year, students took the exam for diagnosing their achievement of previous academic year. When students did not reach the standard of each subject, students took afterschool classes based on the result of that exam. Recently, some education researchers were concerned about the increase of students who did not achieve the standard. The purpose of this interview was to figure out the characteristic of students who had the low achievement of science. Three students were selected as interviewees for this study (Table1).
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Name |
Gender |
Grade |
Age |
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A |
Girl |
4 |
10 |
|
B |
Girl |
4 |
10 |
|
C |
Boy |
5 |
11 |
Table 1. Subject
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Figure 2. The interview with students
The view of science
When the researcher met with interviewees, they usually had the unclear responses on the questions of science. The students thought that science is difficult, but did not answer the reason why they felt that. The ‘A’ student thought the experiment is interesting and difficult at the same time. The ‘B’ student had the similar view of science. She thought that science is difficult because of huge number of experiments. The ‘C’ student had a different response from the previous ones. He wanted to be a scientist in the future at the fourth grade due to the science teacher. At that time, the ‘C’ student had a positive aspect of science affected by the teacher.
The informal science education
The beginning stage of this study was to explore students’ career awareness. Related to the first step, the researcher was curious about interviewee’s thoughts of scientist. The ‘A’ student did not know what scientists do. When the researcher talked about a spaceship, the ‘B’ student had never seen it and did not know what that is. The ‘C’ student did not remember the video clip of scientist. They were in common in terms of informal science education at the end of interview. In other words, they did not have enough scientific experience out of school.