Özet

Distance education is a type of education in which educators and students carry out education and training activities synchronously and/or asynchronously as distanced from the collective social areas (Simonson, Smaldino, & Zvacek, 2015). With the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in 2019, distance education was also adopted in primary schools as in all grades of education. However, students in primary school are in “ The Concrete Operational Stage” of Piaget’s cognitive development periods. Thus, learning must be comprised principally of concrete contents and activities. Distance education eliminate concrete learning in face to face teaching. This situation can be expressed as a limitation for primary school students. Besides, e-learning adopted within this period is regarded as a form of carrying face to face teaching to online lesson environments. The process includes theacher’s conduction of the usual face to face class in form of online class, and then students’ doing homework. In an online class in which a subject specially taught for the first time, the teaching process can be often interrupted by the technical problems. Consequently, when the limitations of traditional education are considered as well as the possible limitations of distance education for students in primary school, it can be thought that process being experienced leads to some problems for these students. The Flipped Classroom (FC) Model can be used in an attempt to solve these issues.

The FC Model is an application based on learning elementary and theoretical parts of a subject with the help of educational technologies in extracurricular time and on performing higher-level studies during the lesson (Baker, 2000; Bergmann & Sams, 2012). It can be stated that the FC Model is suitable for primary school, as it opens up space for higher-level activities and more concrete activities in the classroom by taking simple parts of the subject out of the classroom. Thus, there are studies proving that, in primary school, the FC Model provides more effective learning than traditional teaching (Elian, & Hamaidi, 2018; Gökdaş, & Gürsoy, 2018; Yang, & Chen, 2020). In this regard, in the event that face to face teaching can’t be implemented, the FC Model can be suggested for use with the purpose of increasing efficiency by adapting to distance education in distance education applications used by students in primary school. No relevant research conducted in primary level exist. However, in research studies conducted with the university students, it was proved that in comparison with online learning, the FC Model with online-based has more positive impacts on learning (Tang vd., 2020) and that it is as effective as the conventional FC Model (Hew, Jia, Gonda, & Bai, 2020). As a result, it is suggested that the FC Model be used in primary school as part of distance education.

The FC Model with distance education can be carried out as follows: Teachers can prepare online materials (such as a video) consisting of basic and theoretical parts of the subject that he or she will teach in accordance with the nature of the FC Model. Students are expected to complete preliminary learning related with the subject through this material before the online classes. Higher-level studies, online activities, or homework can be done with students who come to the online lesson knowing the subject significantly. Thus, in online lessons, it can be provided that students can be more active and do difficult homework matters under the guidance of their teacher in interaction with his/her friends. When the FC Model is implemented with distance education, careful attention should still be paid to the typical characteristics of the FC Model itself.