KJC Korea
Journal Central

The purpose of this study is to explore standards of elementary school teachers required for implementation of inclusive classroom. For the purpose of this study, in-depth interviews were conducted with 14 elementary school teachers who had experience of implementing an inclusive class for more than 3 years and received a reputation for running an inclusive class well from parents of students of disabilities, fellow teachers and pre-service teachers. Interview questions include attitudes toward implementation of inclusive classroom, classroom management strategies, and also instruction of students with disabilities in inclusive classroom. Findings of this study are as follows. First, teacher standards for implementing an inclusive classroom can be categorized into accountability, knowledge, and executive ability. Responsibility is formed based on the sense of homeroom for students with disabilities. Knowledge covers a wide range of contents necessary to implement an inclusive classroom such as disability, behavioral support for students with disabilities and classroom management strategies. And above all, the inclusive classroom can be successfully implemented only when various strategies are applied and practiced. Second, accountability, knowledge, and executive power are interdependent and only work meaningfully when all three factors are exercised. Third, the difficulty of operating an integrated class, which the participants in the study say, is the dual system of special education and general education and the school system that does not support integrated education, and the public system is used to cope with this. Implications were discussed based on the results of this study.

This study aims to develop a school adaptation scale for middle- and high-school students that refleact a transformed school environment. The scale reflects the features of the digital era, in which the connection between online and offline worlds transforms a school environment that promotes the self-directed and proactive school life of students. We also added a new domain about course comprehension and communication among class members in environments that were expanded to include cyber space. An expert panel evaluated the newly developed items for each subscale, which were based on the original scale, for content validity. It was scaled through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses based on the results of the pilot study (N = 364) and the main survey (N = 461). The scale was finalized to 49 items under five subscales (i.e., relationship with teacher, relationship with peers, class comprehension and participation, rule compliance and activity, and cyber class and communication). The scale was then validated through an evaluation of construct validity, concurrent validity, and cross validity. The newly developed scale is effective in providing an in-depth understanding of individuals currently in school and developing tailored intervention and support. It can be useful as a method for obtaining foundational data for various studies on the school life of students. The mean scores for the subscales will contribute to the understanding the level of school adaptation among individual students and to exploring the details of each aspect of their experiences of school environments. Hence, the scale will also be useful as a diagnostic tool for examining the school life of middle- and high-school students.

This study aims to develop a school adaptation scale for middle- and high-school students that refleact a transformed school environment. The scale reflects the features of the digital era, in which the connection between online and offline worlds transforms a school environment that promotes the self-directed and proactive school life of students. We also added a new domain about course comprehension and communication among class members in environments that were expanded to include cyber space. An expert panel evaluated the newly developed items for each subscale, which were based on the original scale, for content validity. It was scaled through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses based on the results of the pilot study (N = 364) and the main survey (N = 461). The scale was finalized to 49 items under five subscales (i.e., relationship with teacher, relationship with peers, class comprehension and participation, rule compliance and activity, and cyber class and communication). The scale was then validated through an evaluation of construct validity, concurrent validity, and cross validity. The newly developed scale is effective in providing an in-depth understanding of individuals currently in school and developing tailored intervention and support. It can be useful as a method for obtaining foundational data for various studies on the school life of students. The mean scores for the subscales will contribute to the understanding the level of school adaptation among individual students and to exploring the details of each aspect of their experiences of school environments. Hence, the scale will also be useful as a diagnostic tool for examining the school life of middle- and high-school students.

This study aimed to show how the space for learning in classroom proceeds through the internal array of teacher feedback within the three-turn initiation-response-feedback (IRF) sequence. The observed data was extracted from actual classrooms in Korean primary schools and high schools. The observations are given to characterizing how the feedback of the third turn position contributes to the continuous proceeding of three-turn sequence in classroom language. Specifically, we focused on the following two issues. First, based on the classroom data, we describe and analyze what is to be done through the teacher’s feedback turn. We come to highlight the ways in which teacher feedback is so explicated or so brief, and draw an estimation about how the construct of a series of feedback pattern keeps company with the interactional competence of feedback. In order to make the issue empirically concrete, the spatial array of several feedback exchanges has been characterized in terms of the sequential pattern ranging from [acceptance] to [questioning more] or [announcing next act]. Second, concerning the role of pauses in classroom language, what is conveyed by a pause is also a good instance of learning space. Based on these findings, two types of pauses are taken to present in terms of conversational turn-taking, being either within-turn or between-turns. It is also discussed that pauses are versatile in their interactional competence. Moreover, the occurrence of a pause may show a very signal of wait time, or a signal of the selection of the speaker. In this regard, the pause interval is shown to be a significant feature of classroom interactional competence. By addressing these issues, we gained a better understanding about the three-turn IRF sequence, not only as a space for learning but also as a space for interaction.