The main objective of the dissertation was to develop and evaluate the tool for providing written feedback, by means of which teachers would like to encourage self-regulation of pupils’ learning and behaviour. Pupils who are capable of greater self-regulation of learning and behaviour have better learning outcomes. The teacher's principles and strategies for classroom management influence the development of self-regulation of individual pupils' learning and behaviour and the classroom climate. For effective classroom management, teachers need appropriate skills to create conditions in the classroom under which pupils can achieve good learning outcomes. When implementing classroom management strategies, teachers must take into account that gender differences in pupil self-regulation and social skills increase during adolescence; girls use self-regulation strategies for learning more often and regulate their behaviour better than boys, and they also differ in the range of strategies used. The development of self-regulatory skills takes place from early childhood to adulthood. Through appropriate professional feedback, teachers can guide pupils to develop self-regulatory skills, i.e. self-observation, imitation, self-control and self-regulation of learning and behaviour. Professionally designed and appropriate feedback encourages pupils to accept it proactively and contributes to greater pupil motivation to learn and consequently to better learning outcomes. Digital technology plays an important role in monitoring the development of self-regulatory skills over time and enables the recording, collection, processing and analysis of collected data on pupils' schoolwork, learning outcomes and behaviour. Digital technology enables rapid exchange of feedback and thus to monitor pupil progress, learning achievements and behaviour in the school context more effectively. The way the educational stakeholders, i.e. pupils, teachers and parents of pupils, are prepared for the use of use digital technology in education is significantly influenced by their digital literacy and their attitudes towards technology. With the help of digital technology, extensive databases of digital data on pupils’ progress, learning achievements and behaviour can be easily processed and effectively presented through visualization, so that teachers, school management and school policy makers can obtain general and comparable information on the state of education in Slovenia.
In the empirical part of the dissertation we present the research results aimed at the development and evaluation of an online tool for the promotion of self-regulation of learning and examine the impact of digitally transmitted written feedback on the development of pupils’ self-regulation of learning and behaviour. The tool that we named Pripomoček PPI (the tool for giving praise and necessary improvements) was implemented as a software module and integrated into the school management information system. Based on the analysis of the written feedback in the online environment of the information system, collected before the research in this dissertation, we found that teachers in Slovenia give their pupils much more negative comments than praise in written feedback. Therefore, we designed the tool Pripomoček PPI to make teachers aware that positively oriented feedback has a positive effect on pupils' self-esteem and perceived learning competence. In cooperation with the teachers, we created various content categories in the tool Pripomoček PPI to describe the strong areas of the pupils' schoolwork and behaviour.
In the first section of the empirical part of the dissertation, we present the process of developing the tool for giving written feedback in a digital environment. In this process we analysed the teachers' satisfaction with the functionality of the classroom management information system (e-Assistant), which includes several modules. The analysis of teachers' opinions on the usability of the module Pohvale in Pripombe (“Praise and Negative comments”) showed that teachers are satisfied with the functionality of the existing module Pohvale in Pripombe and consider it useful for providing written feedback. We also analysed teachers' opinions on the adequacy and frequency of recording and providing feedback to pupils and their parents, as well as their opinion on the importance of monitoring different areas of a child's development. We found that teachers are aware of the importance of feedback and that they believe that frequent and continuous feedback is important to create a stimulating learning environment and to promote pupil progress, and that teachers are willing to write feedback to pupils even if they believe that they are already very busy. For all the areas of observation of child development identified, most teachers felt that it is important to observe the individual pupil. Based on the analysis of the data collected, we also identified and defined the criteria for the evaluation of the tool, which we used in the evaluation process when continuing the research.
In the second section of the empirical part of the dissertation we present the results of the analysis of the pupils' learning and motivation strategies, their self-regulation of learning and the results of the analysis of the teachers' perception of the pupils' self-regulation of learning over a period of three months. Based on the analysis of the pupils' self-assessments we found that the pupils improved their learning self-regulation in a statistically significant way, whereas the pupils did not improve their learning self-regulation based on the analysis of the teachers' perception, but even reduced it in a statistically significant way in the case of the factor Demonstrating critical thinking in a learning situation named by the author. It should be noted that self-assessments were not given by the same students as assessed by teachers, so we did not calculate correlations. Due to a number of other possible effects, such as the impact of the novelty of the introduction of the tool Pripomoček PPI and the research assumption that the improvement of pupil self-regulation cannot be exclusively due to the use of the tool, we believe that the ability of pupils to self-regulate their learning and behaviour should be observed over a longer period of time. We should also consider using different methods and ways of data collecton when measuring students self-regulation.
In the third part of the empirical research we investigated the communication between teachers, pupils and parents using the tool Pripomoček PPI. The analysis of the collected anonymized written feedback from teachers to pupils over a period of six years and the qualitative analysis of the stratum sample of collected written feedback by individual subcategories of pupil monitoring showed that pupils from Slovenian primary and secondary schools who participated in the survey received much more feedback with suggestions for improvement of their school work than praise. The teachers participating in the survey wrote to their pupils a lot of written feedback concerning the completion of school tasks and homework. Teachers of grades 1 to 5 and secondary school teachers wrote more praise to their pupils than guidance on what and how they could improve their school work and learning, while subject teachers wrote more guidance on what and how they could improve their learning or behaviour to their pupils than praise. Teachers praised girls statistically significantly more than boys and gave boys statistically significantly more guidance on what and how they could improve their learning or behaviour than girls.
The analysis of the tool Pripomoček PPI from the perspective of the end users, i.e. teachers, pupils and parents, has shown that the tool Pripomoček PPI enables teachers to observe pupils learning and behaviour and that it is a suitable tool to motivate pupils to do school work. According to the teachers, the use of the tool Pripomoček PPI has not had any impact on their own motivation for teaching, their own effectiveness in teaching, their own achievements in teaching and in other work at school, their responsibility for their work or their own professional development, but at the same time the teachers believe that the use of the tool Pripomoček PPI has increased their sensitivity to the perception of individual areas of pupil learning and behaviour and increased the frequency of including these areas in written feedback and communication with pupils. Teachers felt that their written feedback provided through the tool Pripomoček PPI did not affect the pupils' ability to self-regulate learning, but most of the parents involved in the study noted the positive effects of using the tool Pripomoček PPI on their child's response to oral and written feedback, on the child's inner motivation to learn, on the child's time management for learning, on the child's choice of learning methods, on the child's monitoring of its own learning strategies, on the trust, the communication and the respect between the child and the teacher, the child and the parents and the parents and the teacher. The positive effects of using the tool Pripomoček PPI on the quality of collaboration between pupils, parents and teachers were also noticed by all pupils participating in the study, who are convinced that the feedback they received using the tool Pripomoček PPI has improved their learning, behaviour and learning outcomes. The usefulness of the tool Pripomoček PPI was confirmed by all pupils participating in the study and by most parents. Most of the participating teachers felt that they did not need written instructions on how to use the tool, as they felt that the tool led them to use it intuitively, that they did not recognize major systemic problems and that their data entry errors could be easily corrected, that they learned quickly to use the tool or could remember easily how to use it, that they were satisfied with the tool and would recommend it to others.
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