Student Experiences of the Leaving Certificate Applied Programme

SCHOOL EXPERIENCES AND LEARNING PROCESSES AMONG LCA PARTICIPANTS 75and for their behaviour. Other types of positive interaction appearsomewhat more common among LCA students but the differencesbetween the two groups are not significant.Figure 5.13: Nature of Teacher-student Interaction in Sixth Year, as Reported byStudents% v. often/often706050403020100Askedquestionsin classBeen askedquestionsTold workgoodPraised foransweringquestionPraised for Given out to Given out towritten work re work re behaviourLCALCE/LCVPSource: Post-Primary Longitudinal Study (PPLS) database.In keeping with other Leaving Certificate students (see Smyth et al.,forthcoming), LCA students reported a shift in attitudes among teacherstowards expecting students to take more responsibility for their ownlearning. Some students were somewhat surprised at this new approach:Like they weren’t forcing stuff down your neck to learn you know … it changedbig time. There’s actually one thing that kind of shocked me, it’s like, if you don’tdo the work, it’s not our problem, you know, you have to do it, so they made youkind of pick yourself up and do the work because if you didn’t then it was yourproblem. But in first to third year … they were on your back the whole time to dothis and to do that, you had to because they were telling you to do it. (Ronan,25, completed LCA, apprentice)In general, LCA students were slightly more likely than other students toreport liking most of their teachers (87 per cent v. 82 per cent in sixth year).LCA students are more likely to report that ‘teachers would help me if Ihad a problem with my schoolwork’ (95 per cent v. 87 per cent in fifthyear) and are less likely ‘not to tell the teacher if I don’t understand’ (15 percent v. 21 per cent in sixth year; 23 per cent v. 27 per cent in fifth year).Furthermore, LCA students are more likely than other students to reportalways trying to answer questions in class (77 per cent v. 58 per cent). Sarahreported that the smaller class size and the encouragement received meantthat she was much more likely to actively contribute in class than she hadin junior cycle:When there’s a bigger class there and there’s a lot of kind of pressure I supposeand you know all the students and things, I’d never speak up in case I was kind