Exploring Middle School Students' Attitudes and Satisfaction About Home-Based Online Education During the COVID-19 Epidemic and the Influential Variables

Background: Students' attitudes and satisfaction are important predictors of educational quality, especially under such special situation as large scale home-based online education during the COVID-19 epidemic. Objectives: This study investigated middle school students' attitudes and satisfaction about home-based online education during COVID-19 epidemic and potential influential variables. Methods: Survey data were collected from 788 middle school students in two typical Chinese public schools. Multinomial logistic regression analysis and ordinal logistic regression analysis were used to identify influential variables. Findings: We found that more than half of surveyed students felt that home-based online learning was either the same as (35.9%) or better than (18%) traditional face-to-face learning, while 46.1% felt that it was worse than traditional face-to-face learning. More than six tenth of surveyed students felt satisfied or very satisfied with their home-based online education, while less than one third kept neutral attitudes and very few felt unsatisfied or very unsatisfied. Importantly, the study found some influential variables impacting students' attitudes and satisfaction about home-based online education and they included individual variables (gender, time spent in doing homework, level of learning engagement), organizational variables (school type), and relational variables (time spent on communication and relationship with family members).