Page No 16-24
Deborah A. Stiles, Alisha L.McElrath, Jane E. Lucas Janaki Rajan, Garima Goel Gupta
School of Education, Webster University, U.S.A. Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi
Most studies of student-teacher relations and student achievement in reading and
mathematics focus on test results and the opinions of school leaders, educationalists,
and other experts. This study sought to understand the perspectives of 471 young
adolescents as revealed in their drawings and written comments. The drawings of
50 young adolescents from India were compared with matched samples from the
U.S.A, Mexico, South Africa, Ghana, Switzerland, Iceland, and Singapore. When
compared to the young adolescents from seven countries, the young adolescents in
India expressed more negative views of school and school subjects and depicted their
classroom experiences as more unfriendly, irrelevant, and unpleasant. Similar fi ndings
were reported in the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment surveys.
School psychology and educational psychology are the branches of applied psychology
that can address the negative views of young adolescent students and help with school
improvement in India.