Zbornik Instituta za pedagoska istrazivanja 2014 Volume 46, Issue 2, Pages: 320-338
https://doi.org/10.2298/ZIPI1402320P
Full text ( 290 KB)
Student initiative: A conceptual analysis
Polovina Nada (Institute for Educational Research, Belgrade)
In the description and scientific consideration of the attitude of children
and youth towards their education and development, the concept of student
initiative has been gaining ground lately, and it is hence the subject of
analysis in this paper. The analysis is important because of the discrepancy
between the increased efforts of the key educational policy holders to
promote the idea about the importance of the development of student
initiative and rare acceptance of this idea among theoreticians, researchers
and practitioners dealing with the education and development of children and
youth. By concretising the features of initiative student behaviour, our aim
was, on the one hand, to observe the structural determinants and scientific
status of the very concept of an initiative student, and, on the other, to
contribute to the understanding of the initiative behaviour in practice. In
the first part of the paper we deal with different notions and
concretisations of the features of initiative behaviour of children and
youth, which includes the consideration of: basic student initiative,
academic student initiative, individual student initiative, the capacity for
initiative and personal development initiative. In the second part of the
paper, we discuss the relations of the concept of student initiative with the
similar general concepts (activity/passivity, proactivity, agency) and the
concepts immediately related to school environment (student involvement,
student participation). The results of our analysis indicate that the concept
of student initiative has: particular features that differentiate it from
similar concepts; the potential to reach the status of a scientific concept,
bearing in mind the initial empirical specifications and general empirical
verifiability of the yet unverified determinants of the concept. In the
concluding part of the paper, we discuss the implications of the conceptual
analysis for further research, as well as for enhancing the practice of
teachers’ work in the direction of strengthening students for the development
of their own initiative in the learning process.
Keywords: conceptual analysis, student initiative, student academic initiative, student involvement, student participation
Projekat Ministarstva
nauke Republike Srbije, br. 179034: Od podsticanja inicijative, saradnje,
stvaralaštva u obrazovanju do novih uloga i identiteta u društvu i br. 47008:
Unapređivanje kvaliteta i dostupnosti obrazovanja u procesima modernizacije
Srbije