Sixty-four percent of Taiwanese teenagers want to go back to school and resume in-person classes because they miss interacting with their peers, a King Car Culture and Education Foundation poll found.
Younger pupils had the strongest desire to return to school, and 43 percent of respondents stated a desire for classes to be evenly split between remote learning and in-person lessons, the foundation told a news conference on Tuesday.
Of the respondents, 71.4 percent said they felt unhappy or depressed while isolated at home, 47.7 percent reported lower levels of concentration and 41.7 percent said they were falling behind in their classes.
Photo courtesy of the King Car Culture and Education Foundation
The results suggest that with demand for Internet-based learning likely to grow, educators should improve their technological skills, the foundation said.
Most respondents experienced increased friction at home, with the most common family squabbles being about parental restrictions on using computers or devices, leaving the home, and loss of recreation and exercise, it said.
A Taipei high-school student surnamed Lin (林) said she missed social interaction, especially after the novelty of online classes wore off.
“My family thinks that because I am using the computer to [study], I should not use devices in my free time,” she said.
Many adults who had to work from home during the COVID-19 outbreak were left with the unenviable task of trying to manage limited Internet bandwidth, said Chen Fen-ling (陳芬苓), a professor at National Taipei University’s Department of Social Work.
“We cannot place the blame solely on parents for those conflicts at home,” Chen said, adding: “Communication is key when scheduling Internet use.”
The online poll collected 18,265 valid responses from June 15 to July 5, and has a confidence level of 97 percent and a margin of error of 3 percentage points.
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