Students as Research Informants: Lesson learnt from Class Visits

 

I paid class visits to all P.6 classes this week, and all students showed high appreciation and felt very excited about my presence. How nice they were! It is hoped that students could feel the principal’s care and concern for their wellbeing, especially when school life has been much affected by the pandemic in their last year of primary education. Through this platform, students can directly communicate with the principal, and at the same time, the principal can collect feedbacks about students’ perception towards schooling and their own learning performance.

 

Owing to time constraint, I did not have enough time to listen to all feedbacks more in-depth. As a consequence, I conducted 2 questionnaire surveys to investigate how well students were performing as well as how effective the school has been doing. Although the exchange period was so short, I could still be able to hear some very insightful comments and exchange views with most students. As the principal, I treasured such close contact with students in person, and it is good for me to establish a two-way communication channel. I felt the trust and love within the classroom, and the atmosphere between school and students was warm and great!

 

When all P.6 students were told busily filling in blanks in response to the two questionnaires, I also made use of the gap time to invite students to evaluate their overall satisfaction rate of this school –10 marks being the highest and 1 mark being the lowest. Then, using the same rating guidelines, they had to tell me how satisfied they were in terms of their satisfaction about their own learning performance throughout their 6-year learning journey at this school.

 

Interestingly, most students did not highly rate themselves. Most of them gave only 7 or 7.5 marks in a 10-point Likert Scale for their overall performance. Only a few students gave themselves 8 marks, which was the highest among the five classes. Some even gave as low as a 5 to 6 in this self-evaluation exercise, which implied that students used to have high expectations on their own performance, and they admitted that they were not diligent enough. They admitted that they still had much room to improve. This is a good sign for all teachers, of course.

 

Regarding their impression about the school they have attended for several years, nearly all students gave 10 marks. In response to my follow-up question of “Why”, their supporting answers included the following evidence:

• Popularity of the school
• School reputation
• Good facilities – swimming pool, new annex, the multi-purpose hall, library, the new IT equipment, etc.
• Nice people – principal, teachers, classmates, staff, etc.
• Good teaching
• Spatial school environment
• The warm and welcoming school atmosphere
• Learning climate within the school
• A lot of opportunities for students to develop their talents
• Focus on developing people
• Focus on both academic and non-academic development
• Moral education
• Made many good friends
• The languages used
• English
• MI, PRP, Excursions,
• House system,
• Firefly scheme
• Others

 

Although students cannot have a comprehensive review of the effectiveness of the whole school, at least they can provide their first-hand feedbacks to the principal directly. As reflection, when we as school practitioners want to know more about how school can further improve in the future as an ongoing school improvement process, apart from teachers and parents, students can also be included as one of key informants for any school research inquiry.