Teenagers and School

teenagers  and school Of late, growing attention has been paid to schools' capacity to stimulate certain skills and abilities in students, and not just foster knowledge.

Schools are no longer seen as just places where students go to learn facts. The focus has started to turn to schools' capacity to stimulate certain skills and abilities in students. Even the school's role in developing emotional intelligence has been tackled in recent years. Emotional intelligence is manifested in connection with certain non-cognitive abilities, which are worth having a place of their own in the school curricula. This is the conclusion of a survey conducted by the Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, western Romania, jointly with ROI Association and the Institute of Education Sciences, with UNICEF sponsorship.  


Here is Eduard Petrescu, member of the UNICEF office in Romania with more on these non-cognitive abilities.

 "In short, these are abilities that cannot be quantified by means of any standard IQ or knowledge tests. Relevant for the education system are those concerning a personal dimension. I am referring to the way in which, as a person, you manage to get a certain type of insight, the way in which you can control or improve certain types of behaviour, find motivation or use creativity. There is also a social and community dimension: those abilities related to the capacity to establish relationships or the sense of belonging to a group. There are also civic abilities, those that allow you to join projects and the decision-making process."


Given their individual and social dimension, non-cognitive abilities are essential for the harmonious development of a person and therefore they must be encouraged, especially in adolescence, when personalities and characters are formed. For this reason, the survey on these abilities covered teenagers, as the ROI Association Representative Simona David-CrisbasaN told us.


 "During adolescence, physical and mental abilities are developing just like in adults, whereas the emotional side lags a bit behind. And that's why teenagers tend to make all sorts of risky decisions in this period. These social-emotional abilities have several dimensions: some of them are about personal development, discipline, perseverance, self-confidence, initiative. Others are about communicating with the others, establishing relations, about resilience, stress resistance, about how they understand and express emotions. There is also the civic-engagement component, more specifically the involvement in various community projects and the sense of belonging to a community."


Experts have pointed out that, in Romania, non-cognitive abilities are being developed only through extra-curricular activities or activities held in schools as part of a week-long programme entitled "A Different Kind of School". In fact teenagers are more comfortable when involved in volunteer programs than when carrying out the standard school curricula activities. Researchers say this could be explained by the fact that the Romanian educational system still focuses exclusively on passing knowledge from teachers to pupils. How could teachers in schools stimulate non-cognitive abilities and how could these, in their turn, help pupils improve their school performance? 


Simona David-Crisbăşan attempts an answer:

 "It would be better if schools laid emphasis on these abilities, too, and not only on the cognitive ones and on school performance, as it happens nowadays in the educational system. Little importance is attached to communication, personal relations and motivation, although paradoxically, everybody notices that adolescents are not highly motivated or genuinely interested in school. This could be explained by the fact that they do not feel like they are really involved, and it is very important for adolescents to feel involved and to take part in the educational process. In primary school, special emphasis is laid on relationships and the way pupils relate to each other, as there is only one teacher who takes care of the children for four years. More recently, school curricula have been changed and started to take into account personal development, too, but only to a certain extent. In higher secondary education, as of the fifth grade, children feel they are somehow left aside. There is not enough time for them to get involved in the process and that's why they start losing interest and motivation."


Non-cognitive abilities are important not only to enhance pupils' motivation to study but also to help them develop in the future, and schools should also contribute to the pupils' personal development, says the UNICEF representative,Eduard Petrescu:

 "The classic education system, which is still used in Romania, was designed to serve the purposes specific to a certain period of time. But such a system should also take into consideration the fact that society has been developing at a faster pace, both with regard to information, communication, establishing relations, as well as all the other aspects that have an impact on the labour market. Actually, the  main aim of the youngsters' school training should be to improve their capacity to get integrated into social and professional life. We should see how we can help young people better adapt to and face current challenges, by stimulating their non-cognitive abilities."


First of all, teachers themselves should be trained and learn how to stimulate their students' abilities and skills. Then, school curricula should be redefined to include this component, too. As the new curriculum for secondary schools is now under debate, experts say non-cognitive abilities can be developed mostly by using certain teaching methods and by encouraging teamwork.



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Publicat: 2017-02-22 13:34:00
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