Conversations between Rural Basic School Students, Parents and Teachers about Students’ Learning

Abstract

Students grow up and learn in various changing environments that channel their developmental trajectories, moreover, they are not passive targets of environmental influences, but active participants who receive diverse feedback about their successes and failures. Timely formative feedback about their learning helps students to adjust their goals, plans, and behaviour, as well as develop agency/co-agency, which is one of the most important tasks in lifelong learning during this century. Therefore, it is important to find out how frequent and qualitative is the feedback on students' learning provided by teachers and parents (we refer to parents to denote all caretakers/guardians who make decisions about students education) and received by students. The aim of the study was to find out how conversations between students, parents and teachers about student learning contribute to the learning process in rural basic school. To reach the aim of the study two research questions were raised, and to answer them several research objectives were set; the theoretical basis of conversations about learning and examples of good practice in basic education were found out through analysis of scientific literature and normative documents, as well as a survey of 58 students, 32 parents and 16 teachers was conducted in a Latvian rural basic school. To analyse the differences between subgroups of respondents contingency analysis was used, as well as Mann-Whitney and Spearman's rank correlation coefficients were calculated. The results of the theoretical research and survey confirm the importance of individual student-parent-teacher conversations about student learning in the learning process in basic school, as well as highlight differences (including statistically significant differences) in the understanding of such conversations in different groups of respondents.