Assessment and inclusion. The teachers’ experience of emergency remote teaching during the lockdown period

In March 2020 the emergency situation forced the suspension of all in-presence teaching activities for all levels of school in Italy. In its first operational indications, the Ministry of Education underlined that distance learning had two meanings: keep alive the classroom community and avoid the interruption of the learning process. Collecting data from experience (Lucisano, 2020) is essential to verify not only whether these results have been achieved by the schools, but also what are the meanings they acquired in different territorial contexts (Save the Children, 2020). The Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) exacerbated the socio-cultural learning gap among students. This could raise the risk of school dropout and less satisfying learning outcomes (Save the Children, 2020). Among the major weaknesses of ERT, related to inclusive processes, there are the difficulties of evaluative processes that strongly characterized the distance learning (Batini et al., 2020; Ferritti, 2020). This paper aims to show the outcomes of the questionnaire’s qualitative analysis used in the national research SIRD entitled ‘A comparison of the approaches to distance learning adopted in Italian schools in the period of the COVID-19 emergency’. This research aimed to detect useful information to describe and understand the ways in which teachers dealt with distance learning during the lockdown. The questionnaire involved a sample of over 16,000 teachers from all around Italy. We explored the data from the region of Lazio (1,918 teachers) with the aim of analysing the contents of the categories related to inclusion and assessment. We took into account all answers to the open-ended questions that underlined the main strengths and weaknesses of the ERT, the main difficulties encountered by the students and the reports of the teachers. The inclusion category emerged across the four open-ended questions of the questionnaire, with a high percentage distribution of occurrences in the reports of teachers of all levels of school. The assessment category concerned the teaching difficulties related to the new learning environment, bringing out the main difficulties of teachers in the evaluation process. The study’s results show that the critical issues does not only concern the difficulties related to the network access, the possession of devices and digital skills – that always caused digital inequalities – but also didactic problems.