Get to know » Students » Self-reflections:
Student difficulties
The PILNA 2021 student questionnaire collected information about difficulties students experienced beyond well-being. Specifically, the questionnaire asked students to respond to statements about their ability to learn, manage themselves, and navigate their environment. Their responses highlight the learning support needs in the region.
Students were provided with a list of situations and were asked to indicate whether they had any difficulty with them. The situations were framed around physical, cognitive, and behavioural challenges, such as seeing, hearing, managing behaviour and walking. The responses they could give were ‘No difficulty’, ‘A little difficulty’, ‘A lot of difficulty’, or ‘I cannot do it at all’.
Proportions of students experiencing challenges
Table STT1.9 lists the challenges to student learning measured by the questionnaire. This table also shows the proportions of grade five and grade seven students who reported these as either ‘A lot of difficulty’ or ‘I cannot do this at all’. This allows us to identify the proportion of students on whom these factors posed a severe burden.
Overall, the distribution of students reporting at least ‘A lot of difficulty’ across the eight items was relatively concentrated. For both grade five students and grade seven, the proportions of students reporting at least ‘A lot of difficulty’ across the items was between 17% and 29%.
The most frequent difficulties were ‘Controlling your behaviour’ (grade five, 29%; grade seven, 21%) and ‘concentrating and focusing your attention’ (grade five, 25%; grade seven, 23%). The remaining difficulties were reported fairly similarly, with the least reported difficulty being ‘Seeing, even if wearing glasses’ (grade five, 20%; grade seven, 17%).
These findings can be compared with teachers’ responses to a similar set of items (Student difficulties reported by the teacher). Not all the items were the same but there are interesting comparisons that can be made for the items about controlling their behaviour, concentrating and focusing their attention.
What does this mean?
A large proportion of students in Marshall Islands are experiencing quite severe behavioural and cognitive challenges related to learning and school environments in general. One out of five students across both grade five and seven are finding it difficult to concentrate and, relatedly, finding it difficult to control their behaviour. Smaller proportions of students are experiencing difficulties with sensory.
