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Composing primary written report cards: teacher processes and dilemmas

University of British Columbia

Report cards are of great significance, not only to students and parents, but also to the teachers who create them. To date, the process of report card writing has been little researched. The purpose of this study is to explore the issues and dilemmas that primary teachers encounter as they prepare narrative report cards, and in particular, "structured" written report cards, newly mandated in the province of British Columbia. As originally conceived, the intent of the study was to identify information that would prove "useful" to primary teachers and to those individuals charged with providing in-service to teachers in the area of primary report card writing. While these "practical" considerations guided my initial thinking, they were re-shaped early in the investigation to include my concern for capturing the essence of what has been revealed to be an "extraordinary" event in teachers' lives. In order to gain this deeper meaning of the significance of report card writing for teachers and to capture the process as lived by teachers, a decision was made to use phenomenology to guide the research. Six teachers in four different schools in an urban lower mainland community took part in the study. Three conversations took place with the teachers over a period of five months, and these, together with narrating and journal writing, provided a basis for the creation of the text. The study contributes insight into the understanding of the lived meaning of the experience of report card writing for teachers.

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2009-01-19

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/3794

Curriculum Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

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