Browsing by Author "Vainiola, Minna"

The teacher-pupil interaction affects the quality of the pupils' school attendance and school performance significantly. The teacher-pupil interaction has been studied extensively, but the pupils' own perspective on the topic has received less attention. This study examined the pupil's perceptions concerning the teacher-pupil interaction during lessons. The teacher-pupil interaction is affected by several underlying factors such as the school, the class as a learning environment, as well as gender of the pupil. In addition, previous research has shown that school transition affects the quality of the teacher-pupil interaction. The study also looked at the differences in pupils' experiences regarding the quality of the teacher-pupil interaction between schools, class, upper and lower grades and between girls and boys. This study was conducted as part of the Education, Agency and Pedagogical Well-being in primary school - research project (Pyhältö , Soini & Pietarinen , 2010). The authors study involved nine classes from three different schools. Four eight grade and five sixth grade classes. The schools were located in different parts of Finland. The data was collected using images about lesson situations, to stimulate the pupils' writing about these situations. A total of 167 pupils answered the image-projection-task. Two different lesson-situations were selected into the study. The pupil descriptions of the circumstances were first analyzed via content analysis. The findings of the qualitative analysis composed were three different teacher-pupil interaction pro-files. These profiles were given numerical values , which allowed the examination of differences of the pupils' experiences between, gender, class, grade and school. The three teacher-pupil interaction profiles were termed as follows; the qualified, the cynical, and the teacher functioning as a part of the machinery. The interaction profiles were distributed very evenly across the data. There was a statistically significant difference between all the analyzed factors in the interaction profiles. In particular, the experiences about the teacher-pupil interaction between girls and boys proved to be virtually contrary. A more targeted research regarding the topic on a large sample size is needed. Future research would advisably be linked to the introduction of the new curriculum (POPS 2014), which aims to influence the teaching methods and practices and thus inevitably also effects on the teacher-pupil interaction.