Abstract:

The social space is created through relations of its main subjects: the students and teachers. Two of its kinds may be discussed, namely prosocial (friendly) space and antisocial (unfriendly) space. In the adopted scientific concept, the research subject is social space analyzed from the point of view of the school’s atmosphere in the perception of students with behavioral difficulties resulting from ADHD in comparison to students without such difficulties.

The main aim of the research is the characteristics of the school space, as a prosocial or antisocial, in the perception of students with ADHD and without this disorder, through the recognition of selected school climate indicators: relations between students, the ratio of students to teachers, and the educational atmosphere at school.

The research method applied is a diagnostic survey. The tool is a questionnaire directed at students. It contains closed questions with one or several possible answers (disjunctive and conjunctive cafeteria) and open questions. The respondents are 240 students aged 14-15, including 120 with diagnosed ADHD (research group), and 120 without this disorder (control group).

Research results:
The obtained results are presented in the following order: student-peers, student-teacher, student-school. In the student-peer relationship, the average values of good contact with colleagues were lower in the research group than in the control group. A vast majority of ADHD students declare that they have no friends at school to whom they can address their problems, they more often feel uncertain and alone, they fall into conflicts with their peers more often than students without this disorder.

In student-teacher relations, the average value of a positive teacher perception index was lower in the research group than in the control group. This was probably decided by the fact that positive attributes of teachers, i.e., that they teach understandably and interestingly, they understand students, they are friendly towards students, were less frequently indicated by students from the research group than from the control group. Similarly, the average values of good contact with teachers were lower in the research group.

In a student-school relationship, it was found that the relationship between belonging to the research group or to the control group was statistically significant. In the group of students with ADHD, there was a lesser number of students who like to go to school, they also do worse with homework; what is more, the average value of the severity of the feeling of harm was higher in the research group (ADHD).

Conclusions:
School space, in the perception of students with ADHD, is a more antisocial, or less friendly, space for them compared to students without this disorder. In such an antisocial space, there are not very good relations between peers, students and teachers who focus mainly on the results of teaching. School is still a place of fulfilling the duty of education, not always in accordance with the needs and abilities of students, especially those with difficulties. Hence, there is a division between students who have a sense of importance and students who have a feeling of senselessness and powerlessness, and this is close to relations characterized with distance and exclusion. Therefore, it is necessary to change the studied aspects of the school's climate, so that the school space becomes a prosocial space for students with ADHD.

Keywords:

Student with ADHD, prosocial space, antisocial space, school climate, indexes of school climate.