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Home education is becoming an important issue for education policy in almost every country across Europe. It should also be of potential interest to the geography of education which, however, has remained the domain of research to educational studies. Consequently, no studies currently compare the individual aspects of home education by looking for the geographical factors behind this phenomenon. This article sets out to present a current and comprehensive picture of the legislative frameworks regulating home education in all the countries of Europe and tries to identify their spatial context and conditions. It is based on a comparative content analysis of texts collected in an extensive literature review of more than 500 publications and documents. Promising areas for further, more in-depth geographical and educational research on this subject has been identified while various spatial patterns of country's legislative framework on home education was discovered, like the unique position of Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, South-eastern and Central European countries, and factors like collapse of communist totalitarian regimes in the former Eastern bloc, spread of the individualising ideology of neoliberalism, the neolocalism reaction to the standardising effects of globalisation, the international immigration, and the success in the integration of immigrants.

In March 2020 a state of emergency was declared in the Czech Republic in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which that resulted in the closures of schools. The provision of education continued through mandatory remote home-based education. The aim of this study is to use in-depth interviews to show how Czech families with children at the primary levels of education have coped with this situation. Based on a qualitative analysis, it is possible to state that the families who participated in the research were coping well with the situation and had come up with effective arrangements both for providing education and for fulfilling other responsibilities. The research also revealed that many families consider this to be very demanding time. At the same time, we identified that the way how families tackled the situation of home-based education depended on several factors. The key role was played by the school factor, namely the quality of remote education offered by school and the communication between the school and the parents. The analysis showed that although the quality of communication and remote education offered by school improved between spring 2020 and autumn 2020, schools still have much room to improve the education provided.

Mastering a second language, in this case Czech, is crucial for pupils whose first language differs from the language of schooling, so that they can engage more successfully in the educational process. In order to adjust language teaching to pupils' needs, it is necessary to identify which language skills or individual competences set out within the framework of communicative competence should be developed. For this purpose, a new diagnostic test for lower and upper graders of primary schools was designed. Although it is not a high-stakes test, it is essential that its validity, reliability and practicality are ensured, as well as its positive impact on the teaching process, pupils, teachers, schools and society. The present paper introduces the position of pupils with a first language other than Czech in the Czech Republic. It presents a recently developed diagnostic tool and documents the characteristics of the test, such as validity, reliability, impact and practicality.

In the Czech Republic, home schooling is an increasing but still rare education practice. The country is at the same time not favourable to public demonstrations of religion. In such a specific context, we investigated the intersection of religion, spirituality, and home schooling. Drawing on a broad ethnographic research design, we identify three levels of strategies employed by religious or spiritual home-schooling parents to negotiate their 'twofold otherness'. On the individual level, these parents significantly sought religious or spiritual support in their decision to home-school. On the societal level, the local community played a crucial role in assisting parents with home schooling. Simultaneously, fearing the reactions of home-schooling opponents, the families decided to keep their religion or spirituality to themselves. We conclude that the 'twofold otherness' is a vulnerable position for home-schoolers in the Czech Republic which forces the families to remain private about both their education style and spiritual or religious ideology.

Electronic testing has become a regular part of online courses. Most learning management systems offer a wide range of tools that can be used in electronic tests. With respect to time demands, the most efficient tools are those that allow automatic assessment. The presented paper focuses on one of these tools: matching questions in which one question can be paired with multiple response terms. The aim of the paper is to identify how the types of questions used in a test can affect student results on such tests expressed as test scores. The authors focus mainly on the issue of the possible increase in scores that can occur with the use of closed questions, when students, after selecting the answers to the questions they know the correct answers to, then guess the answers to the remaining questions (see Diamond and Evans, 1973, Ebel and Frisbie, 1986, Albanese, 1986). The authors show how the number of distractors (unused answers) included in a question influences the overall test score. The data on multiple-choice and alternative- response tests are well known, but not much is known about matching questions. Estimating formula scores for matching-question tests is important for determining the threshold at which students demonstrate they possess the required level of knowledge. Here the authors will compare the scores obtained for three types of closed questions: multiple choice, alternative response and matching questions. The analysis of matching assignments in this paper demonstrates that they are a useful tool for testing skills. However, this holds only if the assignment has at least two distractors. Then the informational value of this type of assignment is higher than that of multiple-choice assignments with three distractors. The results currently indicate that these types of assignment are not useful if the objective of the testing is to rank students or to distinguish between very good students--and this applies even if two distractors are used. In the case of such an objective, it is better to use multiple-choice assignments.

The paper analyzes the emergence of home education in European post-communist countries after 1989. The case of the Czech Republic representing the development and characteristic features of home education in the whole region is studied in detail. Additional information about homeschooling in other post-communist countries are provided wherever they are available in order to provide a more comprehensive picture of the issue. The driving forces and history of home education after 1989 are described. Current homeschooling legislation is analyzed with special attention paid to the processes of the legal enrolment of individuals into home education, supervision and assessment of educational results. The article concludes that despite the existence of country-specific characteristics, many features of home education in post-communist countries are similar. These generally include the rather strict regulation of home education and the high importance of schools as both gate-keeping and supervising institutions.

The integration of immigrant children into the education system is a process that is accompanied by serious debate, especially in advanced countries, which have large shares of immigrants and a long history of immigration. The poorer educational outcomes of foreign-born children are largely explained there through their socio-economically disadvantaged background compared to the native-born population. This article examines whether the observations for those countries also apply to the Czech Republic--a country with a relatively short immigration history and immigration flows from different source countries than those in Western Europe. Regression analyses conducted on PISA 2012 data focusing largely on the maths skills of 15-year-olds reveal that the performance of immigrant children in Czech schools roughly compares to that of their counterparts in Western Europe. While their PISA outcomes were lower than those of Czechs, this was because immigrant children have poorer conditions at home or in the classroom.

The study describes elements of the daily spatial and time systems relating to online home-based primary education during the pandemic school closures. It was conducted from the children's perspective (semi-structured interviews with children), which is only marginally discussed in research on the effects of home-based education during the COVID-19 pandemic. The data were analysed using thematic analysis. The spatial recontextualization of the household and home, brought about through the transference of school functions to the home environment, cannot be viewed in isolation from the temporal recontextualization. The results point to a fundamental shift in the nature and functionality of educational space and time during the pandemic school closures and online home-based education. It changed not only the home and its time–space structures but also the educational space–time structures. These changes are described and discussed in relation to time-geography concepts and cultural analysis. Moreover, our data show that the children were able to develop strategies for adapting to and coping with the new educational situation and spatial–temporal context during the pandemic-driven shift to home-based education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the fall of the Iron Curtain and especially since joining the European Union, the Czech Republic has become a country with a sharply growing number of immigrants, who more and more often are coming to the country with the purpose of settling long term and starting a family. This change places demands on society as a whole but also on particular areas such as the education system, which needs to integrate these children successfully and ensure that they are provided with quality education. The experiences of countries with a long history of migration have shown a negative correlation between the extent of concentration of non-citizen pupils in a school and their academic performance. Such a relationship is explored in this article which examines the degree of concentration of non-citizen pupils at Czech primary and lower secondary schools both in terms of concentration in individual regions, as the spatial distribution of immigrants tends to be very unequal, and in terms of concentrations at particular schools within individual regions. The article shows that despite a current growing concentration of non-citizen students in some regions, there is not clear evidence to confirm a growing segregation at particular schools.

Home education is becoming an important issue for education policy in almost every country across Europe. It should also be of potential interest to the geography of education which, however, has remained the domain of research to educational studies. Consequently, no studies currently compare the individual aspects of home education by looking for the geographical factors behind this phenomenon. This article sets out to present a current and comprehensive picture of the legislative frameworks regulating home education in all the countries of Europe and tries to identify their spatial context and conditions. It is based on a comparative content analysis of texts collected in an extensive literature review of more than 500 publications and documents. Promising areas for further, more in-depth geographical and educational research on this subject has been identified while various spatial patterns of country's legislative framework on home education was discovered, like the unique position of Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, South-eastern and Central European countries, and factors like collapse of communist totalitarian regimes in the former Eastern bloc, spread of the individualising ideology of neoliberalism, the neolocalism reaction to the standardising effects of globalisation, the international immigration, and the success in the integration of immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The worldwide crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic forced many states to adopt strict anti-COVID measures aimed at social distancing. In the field of education, this involved closing schools and the continuation of education at home. In the Czech Republic, schools first closed in March 2021; the school closures lasted, with a few interruptions, for more than a year. Some educational functions that were traditionally performed by schools were temporarily transferred to parents of school-age children. This fact was a challenge for both schools and families and led to a temporary change in the distribution of educational responsibilities between the school and the family. From March to September 2021, we conducted a series of semi-structured interviews with the parents of children in primary schools who participated in their children's education during the school closures. The data were analysed by means of a thematic analysis. The aim of the study was to shed light on the nature of parents' educational involvement, describe new pedagogical aspects of parenthood that were not a part of it before the mass introduction of remote learning, and understand the reconfiguration of the relationship between school and family. The analysis of the data showed that the transfer of some educational responsibilities onto the shoulders of parents led to a quantitative and qualitative expansion of 'pedagogical' interventions in society, the (auto) didacticisation of parental identities, and a strengthening of parents' ability to engage in pedagogical reflexivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the findings of a study on homeschooling in Czechia. It focuses on the gender aspects of this uncommon educational decision. Based on forty-three individual interviews with homeschooling parents, the article's unifying thread is interest in understanding how mothers are involved in the decision to homeschool, and how the practice is embedded in gendered relationships within the society. We explore the results from two perspectives. First, we consider how the choice to homeschool lies simultaneously in embracing and opposing cultural imperatives of good mothering. Second, we explore the precarious status of homeschooling mothers in relation to economic independence. By shedding light on individual choice within social structures, we situate the practice of homeschooling within the gender inequalities of today's society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electronic testing has become a regular part of online courses. Most learning management systems offer a wide range of tools that can be used in electronic tests. With respect to time demands, the most efficient tools are those that allow automatic assessment. The presented paper focuses on one of these tools: matching questions in which one question can be paired with multiple response terms. The aim of the paper is to identify how the types of questions used in a test can affect student results on such tests expressed as test scores. The authors focus mainly on the issue of the possible increase in scores that can occur with the use of closed questions, when students, after selecting the answers to the questions they know the correct answers to, then guess the answers to the remaining questions (see Diamond and Evans, 1973, Ebel and Frisbie, 1986, Albanese, 1986). The authors show how the number of distractors (unused answers) included in a question influences the overall test score. The data on multiple-choice and alternative- response tests are well known, but not much is known about matching questions. Estimating formula scores for matching-question tests is important for determining the threshold at which students demonstrate they possess the required level of knowledge. Here the authors will compare the scores obtained for three types of closed questions: multiple choice, alternative response and matching questions. The analysis of matching assignments in this paper demonstrates that they are a useful tool for testing skills. However, this holds only if the assignment has at least two distractors. Then the informational value of this type of assignment is higher than that of multiple-choice assignments with three distractors. The results currently indicate that these types of assignment are not useful if the objective of the testing is to rank students or to distinguish between very good students -- and this applies even if two distractors are used. In the case of such an objective, it is better to use multiple-choice assignments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The study results show that there is a significant difference between the needs of learners. Learners from related linguistic areas reach the threshold level of language skills very quickly, whereas children with a very different language (in our case, children from Asia) reach the threshold level of receptive skills quickly, but have big difficulties with productive skills. It is therefore necessary to focus on these areas and pay attention to this in Czech-language instruction. The study also shows that children who were born to foreigners in the Czech Republic or who moved to the country at a very young age do not usually have language problems that complicate their integration into the Czech school system, while children born outside the Czech Republic who move to the country at a later age face problems fulfilling the requirements of the school curricula, which are connected with their insufficient acquisition of the Czech language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyzes the emergence of home education in European post-communist countries after 1989. The case of the Czech Republic representing the development and characteristic features of home education in the whole region is studied in detail. Additional information about homeschooling in other post-communist countries are provided wherever they are available in order to provide a more comprehensive picture of the issue. The driving forces and history of home education after 1989 are described. Current homeschooling legislation is analyzed with special attention paid to the processes of the legal enrolment of individuals into home education, supervision and assessment of educational results. The article concludes that despite the existence of country-specific characteristics, many features of home education in post-communist countries are similar. These generally include the rather strict regulation of home education and the high importance of schools as both gate-keeping and supervising institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]