Browsing by Author "Ylönen, Eino-Juhani"

Goals. The main goal of this study is to find out, how the autonomy supportive pedagogy (ASP, Reeve 2006) suits in Finnish elementary school. Research questions: 1) what challenges and benefits will ASP bring for classroom teacher, 2) how do the applications of ASP differ between the age groups in elementary school, 3) how does ASP look out from colleagues point of view and 4) how do the students sense the autonomy support. Theoretical framework of the study is self-determination theory, which has its base in motivational studies by Deci and Ryan (1985). Methods. The design of the study was case study (Yin 2009) using data- and methodological triangulation. The actual case was a class room teacher applying ASP in his work. The data was collected from that teacher and also from his colleagues, from the school's principal and from the students. Case-teacher's data consists of two focused interviews from 2013 and 2015. Three of his colleagues and the principal had also been focused interviewed during 2015. The student data was collected with a quantitative Learning Climate Questionnaire -survey (n=48). The qualitative data was analysed by theory-based analysis (teorialähtöinen sisällönanalyysi) and the quantitative data by Kruskal-Wallis' non-parametric analysis. Results and conclusions. Main benefits of ASP were the increasing autonomous thinking and responsibility of own tasks. On the contrary, the main challenges were the noise in class and a long period of running the ASP in for the students. For the sixth-graders it can be possible to create an independent environment of "studying" but for the first-graders the main application of ASP was children's play. From the colleagues point of view ASP may increase student's adaptability for changes and also create difficulties for obeying the school rules. The sense of autonomy among the students was not dependent from teachers practical theory with this data.