Primary School Teachers’ Perceptions of School Report

Abstract

School report is a document prepared by a teacher to follow up and evaluate a student’s progress in lessons throughout a certain educational period. It is also an academic tool that allows the student and parents to be informed about the progress during that time and to see the shortcomings and to take the necessary precautions. The main objective of school report is not to show students’ scores or to determine whether they have passed a lesson, but rather, to give information about their current state, to manage their skills by taking their differences into account, to guide them according to their interests, needs and skills, to determine the difficulties and deficiencies they come up against throughout the learning process and to help do away with them. However, if a school report is only considered in terms of scores and so becomes an indicator of students’ success or failure, taking the report as a reference, the students whose report shows them successful might consider themselves more accepted, more important and valuable. Those with lower academic success, on the other hand, are naturally driven into a defensive psychology, which causes serious problems because the report has become the main target and is only assessed in terms of scores. The fault of parents and teachers to regard school report as an aim to achieve affects students negatively in many ways and might cause psychological problems in them in the short term. Perspectives arising from wrong responses, worries and fears, comparisons, high expectations, attributing failure to personality, critics without thinking, weathering and unnecessary rewards or punishments once again reveal the importance of school report worry. The research aims to reveal how primary school teachers, the first step of teaching, perceive school report. Teacher’s perception of school report is the variable playing a fundamental role in shaping both student’s and parents’ definition of and expectations from school report. The research encompasses 190 primary school teachers in the city of Kutahya. According to the research results, 62,6% of the teachers think that school report shows the lessons the students are good at and 61,6% think that school report shows the lessons the students are deficient in and their academic progress while 59,5% consider it only as a tool. The teachers don’t consider school report as a means of punishment and as the determiner of personality, and they think that it shouldn’t be a source of honor or shame. The findings show that primary school teachers’ perceptions of school report are mostly positive in favor of students. In this respect, it can be said that they perceive school report relevantly to its purpose. Regardless of the age group of the students, not turning the repot period into a trauma is based upon not only teachers’ but also parents and students’ perception of school report. Primary school teachers should reflect their perceptions of school report to students and parents and should also tell them that school reports are only a route map involving certain indicators in the early period and that all students are precious regardless of their reports. As regards to the school aspect, counsellors should explain the purpose of school report to teachers,