COMMUNITY OF ELEMENTARY SCHOOL - DIAGNOSTIC TOOL THAT EXPOSE ON PSYCHOSEMANTIC PRINCIPLE HOW CHILDREN FEEL IN THEIR SCHOOL ENVIRONMENT

Newly created diagnostic tool for school self-evaluation is presented in this paper. The tool exposes how pupils in elementary school (age between 6 and 11) feel in their school environment. The tool answers following questions: Which aspects of school attendance children evaluate as positive and which as negative? Which aspects of formal and informal education make children enjoy the school? Presented tool is based on a principle of the semantic choice test and therefore on the conception that it is possible to uncover the subjective meaning of a given stimulus for a particular individual or group. The tool contains 18 terms relevant to school environment (i.e. my teacher, grades, break, our classroom, my classmates, boys, girls, lunch at school canteen, toilets etc.). The tool is distributed to the children in a form of a simple computer game. Distribution via computer ensures children's interest and their motivation to work with the tool and at the same time it eliminates the necessity of being able to read and write. Each term is represented on the screen by a typical picture and at the same time it is written there in capital letters and accompanied by audio track. The tool was evaluated on almost 1200 pupils from 20 different schools across the Czech Republic. Results show typical feeling of children, characteristic for different groups of children (differentiated mainly by age and sex). Children at elementary school evaluate positively mainly social contacts with other people, whether they are adults or peers. The most positively evaluated term is for girls "My Teacher", while for boys it is "My Classmates". Significant differences have also been found for terms "Boys" and "Girls". Girls see as much more positive the term "Girls", while boys prefer the term "Boys", which is in accordance with the developmental theories describing younger school age as the period of identifying with one's own sex and considering children of my own sex to be better and smarter. There are significant differences in evaluation of the term "Pupils from Higher Grades". The higher grade the children attend, the more negatively they evaluate this term. At the beginning of the school attendance children have no bad experience with older pupils, but this changes during the years spent at the school. The main benefit the tool brings, however, is the possibility for the schools to use it repeatedly if needed (the tool was distributed to all elementary school in the Czech Republic) and compare their own results with standardized profiles. Directors and teachers can thus discover different problems regarding social and physical environment at the school as soon as they occur/before they develop further. The tool can be technically used for each child individually; however for school self-evaluation it is more important to focus on potential problems, which are pointed out as uncomfortable by majority of the children.