34 M. Irhamni and G. A. Sahadewo challenges faced by the students, parents, and teachers during the learning from home process. More importantly, our study is also among the first studies in Indonesia to identify inequality in educational inputs during the learning from home process.
The rest of this chapter is organized as follows. The next section describes the methodology of the study, including the sampling and questionnaire design, and data collection implementation. This is followed by the results which include the results from interviews with parents and teachers. The last section of this study summarizes the conclusion of this study.
3.2 Methodology
3 COVID-19 Widening the Gap in Education: Evidence from Urban Jakarta 35
Fig. 3.1 Sampling design for the online survey
each of the 20 sub-strata of schools in the five administrative cities. We have a total of 100 schools from the five administrative cities and 14 schools from the district of Kepulauan Seribu. The estimated population of students in these schools is 34,000, while the estimated population of teachers is 1,667.
For the in-depth telephone interviews, we randomly select parents and teachers among those who responded to the online survey and gave their consent to be contacted for and participate in the in-depth telephone interview. We choose the grade of parents’ children as the stratum for the random selection of parents and teachers for the in-depth interview. The duration of each interview is at most 30 min, including the reading of the informed consent. A total of 200 parents and 50 teachers participated in the in-depth telephone interview.
3.2.2 Questionnaire Design
We design the online survey questionnaire to obtain data to assess the scale and scope of inequality in the learning process during the COVID-19 pandemic. We also design the questionnaire to identify learning activities at home, challenges in the learning process, and learning innovations undertaken by parents and teachers during the
36 M. Irhamni and G. A. Sahadewo Table 3.1 Key topics of the
online survey questionnaire A: Parents B: Teachers Socioeconomic and
demographic characteristics
Socioeconomic and demographic characteristics Learning activities and
learning environment
Teaching experience and qualifications
Parental involvement Hours spent for planning, teaching, and administrative works
Opinions and attitudes of parents
Ownership and access to ICT for online learning
Challenges faced by parents and students
Teacher’s ICT proficiency Experience using ICT to teach Challenges faced by teachers during learning from home Opinions and attitudes of teachers toward online learning
COVID-19 pandemic. In Column A of Table 3.1, we summarize the key topics of the online survey questionnaire for parents.1
Key variables include socioeconomic and demographic topics, access to tech- nology, parental involvement, perceptions on online learning, and challenges during online learning. On parental involvement, we specifically asked parents for hours spent accompanying their children during online learning on a typical day.
To complement the online survey, we conducted in-depth telephone interviews with parents. We designed the in-depth telephone interview questionnaire to obtain comprehensive information on parents’ strategies in accompanying children during online learning, variation in good practices implemented by parents in adapting to the online learning, and division of roles between household members in supporting the online learning participants.2
We summarize key topics of the online survey questionnaire for teachers in Column B of Table 3.1. Key variables include basic demographics topics, teachers’
ICT proficiency, methods of online learning, and challenges faced by teachers during online learning.
Similar to data collection for parents, we also conduct in-depth telephone inter- views with teachers to obtain their strategies for conducting online learning. Specifi- cally, we design the in-depth telephone interview questionnaire to identify variations
1 The online survey questionnaire can be requested through correspondence with the authors.
2 The in-depth telephone interview questionnaire can also be requested through correspondence with the authors.
3 COVID-19 Widening the Gap in Education: Evidence from Urban Jakarta 37 in methods of online learning, in good practices done by teachers to adapt to students’
situations, and education materials related to COVID-19 prevention. Note that we limit each phone interview to 30 min to reduce respondents’ fatigue and likelihood of dropping.
3.2.3 Implementation
We use Zoho Survey as the online platform to deliver the self-administered online survey. The main advantage of the Zoho Survey platform is the security protocol.
The robust security protocol is important because we collect cell phone numbers of parents who consented to be contacted for the in-depth telephone interview.
We conducted a pilot of the online survey and the in-depth telephone interview between June 8 and July 3, 2020. The objectives of the pilot were to test research instruments; test data collection protocols and logistics; test the optimal method to district the online survey link; and test the optimal strategy to contact respondents for the in-depth telephone interview. For the pilot, we randomly selected a particular sub-district (kecamatan) in Jakarta and selected all schools within the sub-district.
There was a total of 8 schools for the pilot. Note that the pilot sub-district and its schools were not selected for the large-scale online survey.
We implemented the online survey starting from July 27, 2020, which was the second week of the 2020–2021 academic year. We sent the survey link to school supervisors in Jakarta, and the school supervisors sent the survey link to school principles. Such mechanisms allow us to reach all sample schools more efficiently.
On the 6th day of the online survey, we sent a reminder message to parents via school supervisors and school principles. We ended the online survey on August 4, 2020, which was the 9th day of the survey.
A total of 27,042 out of an estimated population of 34,000 parents visited the online survey site. The participation rate was 79%. We note that not all parents participated because many do not own devices to access the online survey. Thus, our sample is potentially biased to those who own devices. Given the potential bias in the sample, the statistics may underestimate challenges faced by parents and students.
Among parents who participated in the survey, 16,452 parents completed the survey. Thus, the completion rate among the participating parents was 60.84%, which is quite high for an online survey. There were 1,882 teachers who accessed the online survey, higher than the estimated population. The data shows that there were teacher respondents from schools that were not in the sample who accessed the survey. About 61.74% of teachers who accessed the survey or about 1,162 completed the survey.
Upon completion of the online survey, we randomly select respondents for the in-depth telephone interview. We started the first in-depth telephone interview on August 6, 2020 and completed the survey on August 28th.
38 M. Irhamni and G. A. Sahadewo
3.2.4 Data Analysis
We use descriptive statistics and regression analysis to analyze the online survey data of parents and teachers. Our first set of analyzes focus on parents. Using descriptive statistics, we analyze access to learning materials and challenges faced by parents and teachers by household expenditure. We also conduct regression analysis and estimate average marginal effects to identify the correlation between access and challenges by household expenditure. In the regression we include covariates such as household expenditure dummies, school poverty level, gender, child grade, dummy for public school, number of children in elementary schools, marital status, father’s employment status, father’s educational attainment, mother’s employment status, mother’s educational attainment, receipt of government social program, receipt of Kartu Jakarta Pintar, school fixed effects, and survey date fixed effects. In the second set of analyzes, we focus on teachers. We specifically focus on analyzing teaching practices and challenges among teachers in low and high-poverty schools.
We use Stata version 15.1 (StataCorp LLC, College Station, Texas, USA) to conduct descriptive analyses.