Schools have been closed in many countries due to the on-going COVID-19 pandemic, but education continues online. Little is known about how parents cope with educating their children in this ...unprecedented situation. Here, we present the results of a rapid survey examining the experience of Czech parents of children in Grades 1–9 (Age ~ 6–15; N = 9,810) with respect to home education during the COVID-19 lockdown. This survey was distributed widely, but only online and parents participated voluntarily. Mainly families with an internet connection and interested in their children's education (i.e., the majority of families with school-aged children in the Czech Republic) took part in the survey. The results show that these families tend to cope well with the current educational situation and view the overall schoolwork transferred to homes as useful. Most children spend 2–4 h a day studying, while parents help them at least half the time. Parents mostly explain task instructions, check the work their children have done, and teach new topics. To a lesser extent, they help their children solve tasks. Teachers appear to assign tasks more often than they provide feedback and/or interact with children. Some parents face difficulties, but those are generally not severe. These include, most notably, a lack of time, issues with technologies, and inadequate teaching skills and content knowledge. Altogether, this work maps the current educational situation in a large segment of Czech families and highlights possible pitfalls to be avoided: in the Czech Republic and beyond.
Purpose This study aims to supplement the international knowledge on factors determining retention in the teaching profession with findings from the Czech Republic. The study aims to answer the ...question of what factors on the part of schools and teachers are related to teachers’ decision to leave the teaching profession, either temporarily or permanently. It also examines the differences between teachers at the beginning and end of their professional careers. Design/methodology/approach This study presents a secondary analysis of the data collected in a survey of 1,230 Czech secondary school teachers implemented in 2021 in the same schools as the TALIS survey in 2018. The longitudinal design makes it possible to observe the impact of school variables on teachers’ willingness to remain in the profession. Data are analysed through logistic regression. Findings The analysis shows the importance of sufficient financial evaluation, the composition of the student body, instructional leadership, and school innovativeness for the retention of teachers in the profession. The analysis further shows that the factors causing teachers to leave the profession differ for those at the beginning and at the end of their teaching careers. Research limitations/implications The limitations of the study lie in the fact that this is a secondary analysis. The questionnaires were not designed in accordance with the aim of our study, and so the variables were constructed from existing data to best fit our chosen framework. Practical implications The results of our analysis indicate that the Czech education policy should focus not only on general increases in teachers’ salaries, but also on the adjustment of increases over the course of a teacher’s career. The starting salary may be important for retaining young teachers in the profession, while at later stages in their careers their decision to stay may be more influenced by other factors. Our research also showed the importance of leadership. In schools where the principal supports his or her teachers and takes care of their professional development, teachers have a greater tendency to stay in the profession than in schools where the management does not perform this function. Originality/value The study enriched international knowledge about factors affecting teachers' retention in the profession with findings from the Czech educational system characterized by high school autonomy and low teacher salaries.
Background: In its communications, the European Commission stresses the importance of vocational education and endorses apprenticeship training. Educational systems that have dual tracks of academic ...alongside vocational learning routes have been shown to generate better labour market outcomes for school leavers and smooth the school-to-work transition. On the other hand, dual tracked educational systems can reinforce the effect of social origin on educational performance: the differences between the achievement of students from a background characterised by low socio-economic status and students from high socio-economic status backgrounds are greater in a tracked system than in a comprehensive one. In addition to these general tendencies, the content and organisation of vocational education differ in individual countries, as do its strengths and weaknesses and impacts on the labour market prospects of young people.
Purpose: This paper studies vocational education in the Czech Republic: specifically, its apprenticeship track leading directly to the labour market. It seeks to answer questions about whether the Czech apprenticeship education system provides its students with the knowledge and skills necessary for success in the modern labour market, and whether it facilitates their transition from school to work. The paper also studies the impact of the high vocational specificity of the Czech education system on educational inequalities and the development of these inequalities over time.
Sample: The research questions are answered using statistical data and analyses of Czech data from international surveys of adult skills: the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), which studied probability samples of adults aged 16-65 years. The IALS data were collected in 1998 and included 3132 cases, and the PIAAC data were collected in 2012 and included 6102 cases.
Design and methods: The IALS and PIAAC data were analysed using binary logistic regression. Descriptive statistics from PIAAC, statistical yearbooks of education and national surveys on the transition from school to work were also used to provide evidence.
Results: The analyses show that in spite of its high vocational specificity, the efficiency of the Czech education system in facilitating transition to the labour market is relatively low, as are the achievement outcomes of its apprentices. This high differentiation, moreover, contributes significantly and increasingly to educational inequalities. In the light of those findings, the paper discusses features of the Czech apprenticeship education system and intended policy measures that are aiming to retain the current structure of the system and foster apprenticeship education.
We introduce a large and diverse Czech corpus annotated for grammatical error correction (GEC) with the aim to contribute to the still scarce data resources in this domain for languages other than ...English. The
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) offers a variety of four domains, covering error distributions ranging from high error density essays written by non-native speakers, to website texts, where errors are expected to be much less common. We compare several Czech GEC systems, including several Transformer-based ones, setting a strong baseline to future research. Finally, we meta-evaluate common GEC metrics against human judgments on our data. We make the new Czech GEC corpus publicly available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license at
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Research shows that the concept of academic futility is promising for studying the mechanisms that cause differences in educational outcomes in general and vocational programmes. The aim of this ...paper is to test the hypothesis that in the Czech Republic, a country with one the largest VET sectors in Europe, the worse achievement of students in vocational programmes can also be explained by academic futility, and to explore the relationship between futility and the track attended. The conceptualisation of academic futility returns to the three-dimensional concept proposed by Brookover and Schneider in 1975. The analysis was carried out on a sample of 4871 upper secondary students. Confirmatory factor analysis showed a good fit of the model for a two-level (student and class) concept of academic futility. Two-level structural equation modelling showed a negative relationship between futility and achievement and a lower culture of futility in classes with higher socio-economic status.
Vocational and professional training tracks can be a good option for many adolescents, many of whom enter these programs with a sometimes hidden burden of negative experiences and attitudes to ...school. This paper explores the sense of academic futility in future VET students at the end of lower secondary education. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 25 Czech students in which they described their experiences from lower secondary school, we found that despite the students’ beliefs that their achievement is the product of their own effort, they describe situations from which it is evident that they noticed (i.e., perceived) that they actually did lose control over their results. At the same time, they explicitly claim that they have full control over their own achievement. This implicit sense of academic futility is created by several mechanisms at the school level: the curriculum, ineffective teaching, grading leniency, and teachers’ distrust of students’ capabilities.
Abstract Recent studies report that the occipito-temporal N170 component of the ERP is enhanced by letter strings, relative to non-linguistic strings of similar visual complexity, with a ...left-lateralized distribution. This finding is consistent with underlying mechanisms that serve visual word recognition. Conclusions about the level of analysis reflected within the N170 effects, and therefore the timecourse of word recognition, have been mixed. Here, we investigated the timing and nature of brain responses to putatively low- and high-level processing difficulty. Low-level processing difficulty was modulated by manipulating letter-rotation parametrically at 0°, 22.5°, 45°, 67.5°, and 90°. Higher-level processing difficulty was modulated by manipulating lexical status (words vs. word-like pseudowords). Increasing letter-rotation enhanced the N170 led to monotonic increases in P1 and N170 amplitude up to 67.5° but then decreased amplitude at 90°. Pseudowords enhanced the N170 over left occipital-temporal sites, relative to words. These combined findings are compatible with a cascaded, interactive architecture in which lower-level analysis (e.g., word-form feature extraction) leads higher-level analysis (e.g., lexical access) in time, but that by approximately 170 ms, the brain's response to a visual word includes parallel, interactive processing at both low-level feature extraction and higher-order lexical access levels of analysis.
Educational effectiveness research has provided evidence about the importance of teacher beliefs and attitudes for teaching and learning. This study builds on the concept of academic optimism, which ...combines 3 aspects of a teacher's professional creed: self-efficacy, trust, and academic emphasis. The study explores the functioning of the collective and individual measures of academic optimism in the Czech environment and studies its impact on students' outcomes. The analyses are based on pilot data from 39 schools, 325 teachers, and 1,316 Grade 9 students and on the data from the Czech Longitudinal Study in Education (CLoSE), covering 163 schools, 1,469 teachers, and 4,798 students. The individual measure was selected for further studies based on 2-level confirmatory factor analysis. Two-level structural equation modelling showed a significant impact of a school's academic optimism on students' achievement even after controlling for prior achievement and socioeconomic status at both the student and the school level.
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