Abstract:

It is common to hear young children express their interest in starting the academic path. These children want to learn quickly and gain the knowledge that older children have. They also want to practice the activities that older peers do. However, it is not uncommon for them to lose their drive as soon as they enter school or in the early years of their academic career. Why does this happen? Why can't many children be interested in study? When children say they dislike school, what do they dislike? Are we aware of what children say or think about school? The present study emerges in this context, with the goal of characterizing what students of the 3rd year of primary school consider as the most positive aspects of the school, the most negative and the aspects that they would change in their school, if it were possible. The second aim of the present research is to understand the relationship between these data and the participants' sociodemographic variables. A total of 1300 of 3rd year students from the districts of Lisbon and Porto participated in the study. The data was collected through a sociodemographic questionnaire and a questionnaire built within the scope of the present research which evaluated the participants' perceptions about the positive and negative aspects of the schools. The results show that students highlight friends/classmates as the most positive aspect of their school, and the vast majority of participants were able to identify the most positive aspect of their school. On the other hand, when asked about the most negative aspect of their school, half of the participants reported nothing. Also about half of the participants would not change anything at their school. There were also several associations between students' perceptions about the most positive and negative aspects of school, as well as what they would change in school with their sociodemographic variables, which denotes the relevance of the context in which students are inserted in their satisfaction with the school and their overall well-being. Results were compared with findings from previous research and reviewed in the context of the current literature on the school psychologists’ role. Implications for the field are also provided.

Keywords:

Satisfaction, Feelings about school, Thoughts about school, Primary school, Education, Students, School success.