La didattica e la valutazione degli apprendimenti durante la DaD: uno studio esplorativo con docenti liguri

The health emergency caused by the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 has led to the closure of schools with the replacement of face-to-face learning with distance learning. The introduction of the DaD has profoundly changed the school contexts and has put a strain on teachers of all levels and school orders, who have been forced to improvise a drastic change in their way of doing school, making the need more and more evident urgent need to acquire new IT skills and more. Teachers had to rethink the entire didactic and relational setting by quickly activating alternative teaching methods and, consequently, also new assessment practices and methods. In this context, the adoption of technological and digital resources, the only useful tool to guarantee the continuity of the educational and didactic process, has forcefully imposed itself on the daily practice of teachers. Without a doubt, the transition to "forced distance" learning has emphasized the problems and critical issues already present in the school. Some critical issues concerned the aspect most linked to the availability of technological and connectivity resources as well as the users' basic technological skills; others aspect concerned, instead, the didactic aspect, the teaching methodology and the evaluation. In this regard, the research conducted has the general objective of investigating the experience of a group of Ligurian teachers during distance learning in order to explore how technology has been used in educational-teaching practices and for student assessment. The study adopts an exploratory research design based on a mixed method. Through a strong interdisciplinarity between psychological, pedagogical and social fields, the research was structured overall in three phases. An initial quantitative survey involved the administration of a web survey to a large number of teachers; two other qualitative surveys followed with the administration of semi-structured interviews and focus groups with the aim of investigating in depth what emerged from the previous quantitative phase. The data collected allows us to intercept the teachers experience and identify important thematic nodes in the light of the research questions. From the analyzed data, it was possible to reconstruct the main changes that the DaD brought about in the teachers' professional activity and in educational practices. It was possible to clarify how DaD was implemented, which tools and practices were used, the positive and negative aspects that emerged from the experience and how the assessment of student learning was carried out by teachers. It was also possible to analyze the differences that emerged from the teachers' experiences based on the school level and the subject taught. The data that emerged from the research represent interesting elements of reflection in order to guide the introduction of digital devices in habitual teaching situations both for learning and for evaluation, could offer useful indications in order to guide training and educational policies useful for redesign intervention strategies for and in the school.