Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

PERCEPTION OF THE EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT BY STUDENTS OF BUSINESS SCHOOL “GEORGI STOJKOV RAKOVSKI” – VARNA

2017; Volume: 19; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

2545-4439

Radka Tomova, Petinka Galcheva, Ivajlo Trajkov,

Business and Economic Development

Business school “Georgi S. Rakovski” – Varna is a public school which prepares students for working in the small and medium-sized enterprises across the city and the country. Additionally, the school actively participates in various European and international projects in order to achieve optimal training for their students, and to ensure that students are competitive on an international level.In order to establish the extent to which the school curriculums and the organised extra-curricular activities satisfy students’ views on effective training on team-working, innovative decision-making in deadline-orientated environments, business planning, product development, and presentation skills; it is important to collect student feedback. Questionnaires are a quick way to assess different aspects of school life – from the effectiveness of school curriculums and the teaching methods employed, to the relationships between teachers and students and between students.Business school “Georgi S. Rakovski” is the second high-school in Varna that was chosen by the authors to test the validity of their devised questionnaire for testing the educational environment. The questionnaire was tested on 210 male and female students from years 9, 10 and 11. Non-hierarchical clustering of the input data was used for data processing. The advantage of this supervised pattern recognition method is that one could preliminary select the number of clusters into which the input data will be classified.The questions were clustered in 5 clusters by non-hierarchical clustering. The clusters were formed by grouping the questions into the following categories: the educational process; the teacher’s role in the educational process; the relationship between teacher and students; the students’ attitude towards the educational process; and the optimisation of the educational process. The results confirmed the correct structure of the questionnaire which takes into account all aspects of mutual interests (teachers and students) into the learning process.Two of the clusters consist of only two questions each. These are topics which students are generally sensitive about and typically attribute very low scores to. Students admit that there are instances of aggression among their peers, even though they claim these to not be daily occurrences. They claim that their delegated group projects and assignments do nothing to bring them together. These results give an indication that further talks are needed between students and teachers for the improvement of the educational environment.The results verified the constructive value of the questionnaire as a method of evaluation of the educational environment.