engleski

How Pupils Learn in Virtual and Traditional Classroom in Primary Education

Virtual classroom or online learning is a digital world of visual, auditory and textual information through which students acquire specific knowledge or develop different skills. Preliminary research with qualitative analysis was conducted in order to test the hypothesis: Are there differences in the quality of acquiring knowledge for pupils in primary education during the process of teaching and learning educational content in the virtual and traditional classroom? The study was conducted in the year 2009 with 19 third-graders of the elementary school "Rapska" in Zagreb. The research analyzed the curriculum content of two subjects, "Mathematics" and "Nature and Society", in two different class types – data analysis and data repetition (exams). The study examined pupils' reaction in their first encounter with the online learning in which they have no direct contact with their teacher. The advantage of the virtual classroom compared to traditional teaching assumes that pupils can learn with their own dynamic (without having to adjust to the rest of the class), that they can learn teaching materials by focusing on the task exercises, data repetition and content analysis. Although the virtual environment motivates pupils to involve themselves more in their work – problem solving, decision making, persistence, development of critical thinking, it can not replace the teacher and his/her main role – guiding pupils in their learning process through intra-personal and inter-personal communication. Educational process requires a harmonious relationship between the virtual environment and classical communication. This preliminary research has shown us that pupils can equally well acquire and adopt curriculum content in the virtual and in traditional classroom. Since the certain number of pupils within the research have worked with the computer for the first time, and also within the virtual environment, we can only conclude that technical incompetence have affected the outcome of the research in favor of traditional classroom in these specific cases. The main assumption for further research is based on the fact that pupils have a prior computer experience in online learning which would go in favor of learning in virtual environment. The article provides preliminary results and as such opens the way for further research in this area.

Virtual Classroom; Traditional Classroom; E-learning; Child; Computer; Communication

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