Self-determined behavior can be fully used by everyone with or without disabilities. It is a prerequisite for academic achievement, transfer, and quality of life. It is emphasized as the best educational practice. The purpose of this study is to ident...
Self-determined behavior can be fully used by everyone with or without disabilities. It is a prerequisite for academic achievement, transfer, and quality of life. It is emphasized as the best educational practice. The purpose of this study is to identify the effectiveness of the elementary Korean language class that is programmed to encourage students with disabilities to set academic goals, to choose activities task, and finally to be able to choose their determination on their own.
Goal-setting is the most important factor which enables students with disabilities to voluntarily participate in learning with motivation. Choice-making is one of the required skills used on daily basis. It helps students with disabilities reduce problem behavior and enhance active participation. These two skills, goal-setting and choice-making are applied for enhancing students' capability to grow as self-determined individual.
In public elementary school, most students with disabilities attend Korean language class in the resource room, and the class is the basic stepping stone for other academic areas such as sociology and many more.
In the study, twenty students with disabilities(from 2^(nd) to 4^(th) grade) participated: the students were included in special classes from four public elementary schools in Seoul. They were divided evenly into two groups, the experimental and the control. Each group had 10 students. The duration of the experiment was total of twenty sessions during the five weeks: four times a week and forty minutes per session. A pretest-posttest control group design was used to compare between experimental and control group.
In the intervention, students with disabilities were able to set academic goals of the nursery rhyme chapter prepared by their teachers. Then, the students analyzed their strengths and weaknesses with the help of their teachers. Finally, they chose activities (e.g., reciting, dictating, and drawing contents of nursery rhyme, etc.) and made plans according to their goals.
Once the goal-setting and choice-making of each session were complete, they chose the nursery rhyme for learning and performed the activities planned beforehand to achieve their goals. After the scheduled session, the students evaluated goal-attainment with their teacher's support. If the students attained the goal, they repeated the first session (goal-setting, assessing their strengths and weaknesses, and planning). If the students failed to achieve the goal, they modified their goals and activities.
As a result, this study identified that the academic achievement in the experimental group was significantly higher than that in the control group. The behavior of the experimental group was significantly more self-determined.
From the results above, the intervention using component elements of self-determined behavior was verified to have positive effects on enhancing students' academic achievement and self-determined behavior.
Therefore, this study imply that intervention using component elements of self-determined behavior could be a useful teaching strategy to improve academic achievement and self-determined behavior. In the future study, teaching methods should be investigated using not only component elements mentioned in this study but also other component elements of self-determined behavior for students with disabilities.