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Article
Chinese Parents’ Perception of Emergency Remote K-12 Teaching-learning in China During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Asian Journal of Distance Education
  • Tianhong Zhang, Cedarville University
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2-27-2021
Abstract

After Chinese government firstly released COVID-19 outbreak news in the world, the Chinese educational system launched the emergency remote teaching-learning (ERT) as the response to COVID-19 as new virus pandemic with the mission of “suspending schools without stopping teaching-learning”. The challenges that teachers, students and parents encountered and the ed-tech strategies that teachers and schools used in terms of effective remote teaching-learning has got the attention from the countries around the world. Since parents are the significant stakeholders of K-12 education, for better understanding the challenges in emergency remote teaching-learning from parents’ lens, their reactions are worth a word. In this qualitative case study, parent participants (N=741) from 16 provinces in mainland China gave responses to four open-ended questions in the web-based questionnaires released on wjx.cn (问卷星). The themes emerged from the thematic analysis. The participants emphasized that online teaching-learning can’t replace face-to-face one in the brick-and-mortar classrooms in terms of “no learning atmosphere” from the perspectives of students’ behavior, cognitive and emotion engagement. Parents held a pessimistic attitude towards the quality of online teaching. Parents argued that remote teaching-learning would be a disaster for students with poor self-regulation and learning autonomy. In depth, the parent participants’ concerns about emergency remote teaching-learning mirror the challenge of accountability in remote education. The current study suggests the school administrations to develop the systematic professional development programs for training the collaboration among in-service teachers, students and their parents how to develop online learning community and keeping student engagement in remote learning.

Keywords
  • Emergency remote teaching-learning,
  • COVID-19,
  • parents’ attitude,
  • face-to-face teaching-learning,
  • learning atmosphere,
  • student engagement
Creative Commons License
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Citation Information
Tianhong Zhang. "Chinese Parents’ Perception of Emergency Remote K-12 Teaching-learning in China During the COVID-19 Pandemic" Asian Journal of Distance Education Vol. 16 Iss. 1 (2021) p. 16 - 30 ISSN: 1347-9008
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/tianhong-zhang/18/