The challenges and opportunities of distance learning chemistry in institutions of general secondary education

In recent years, all over the world there has been a growing interest in organizing the educational process with the help of technical teaching aids. This question arose in connection with the transition of educational institutions to distance learning, especially acute. The article reveals a number of problems and challenges that have arisen among students of general secondary education institutions in connection with an unplanned, rapid and indefinite transition to distance learning. Educators name the following main disadvantages hindering effective distance education: dependence on technological devices and the Internet; problems with the concentration of schoolchildren; low level of information and communication competence of participants in the educational process; bias in assessing the educational achievements of schoolchildren; an increase in the load on participants in the educational process and others. We conducted a voluntary and anonymous survey of schoolchildren in the city of Sumy and the Sumy region in order to comprehensively study these problems. A detailed analysis of the survey is described. The effectiveness of the remote form of conducting chemistry lessons was experimentally tested in the seventh grade. We calculated the average score of the students' assessments and the coefficient of assimilation of the educational material. Both indicators had negative dynamics if the educational material was studied by schoolchildren remotely during the nationwide quarantine and the transition to online education. Thus, the average scores of pupils' assessments fell by 5.66 and 5.17% for each subsequent topic that was studied remotely; the coefficients of knowledge assimilation also decreased by 5.59 and 5.10%, respectively. Such results, in our opinion, indicate the need to improve the approaches existing in domestic education to the introduction of distance learning in institutions of general secondary education. We believe that the urgent need to develop guidelines for teaching chemistry lessons arose when organizing distance learning, taking into account the specifics of this disciplin