The Gurgaon school where the shooting took place

New Delhi, Dec. 16: India’s apex school research body plans to peek into students’ minds to identify hidden emotions that determine how they view the time spent in school and how they perceive teachers and courses.

Faced with growing instances of intolerance and violence in school as well as declining attention levels, the National Council for Education Research and Training (NCERT) has decided to turn to students for solutions.

“We want children to describe their emotions about the process of learning to us. That is crucial as it will assist us in preparing teachers to deal with the children and their emotional needs. Emotions are the key,” Seema Gulati, who heads the psychology department at the NCERT, said.

Students of Classes VII, IX and XI will be asked to reply to open-ended questions and fill in incomplete sentences, which will then be evaluated by the NCERT’s psychology wing. This is the first time that the NCERT is trying to understand the “emotional aspects” of schooling.

Although the NCERT had planned it earlier, the study comes soon after India witnessed its first school shooting, which left a Class VIII student dead after two classmates shot him at Euro International School in Gurgaon.

Agastya and Vikram (names changed) have told police that they had attacked Abhishek Tyagi to take revenge against his bullying ways.

That the simmering tiff had not been brought to the notice of teachers and school authorities indicated that the students were not comfortable revealing their emotions to their teachers, school principal Mamta Sharma said.

“They never complained to us. We never had a clue something like this was going to happen,” Sharma said.

For the NCERT study, students will be asked to complete sentences like “I feel happiest when my teacher…,” Gulati said.

The research will be conducted in two phases and NCERT officials hope to complete it by 2009.

First, the NCERT will try and understand what makes students like or dislike the way their teachers treat them, what makes the school environment friendly and whether the curriculum helps them understand their likes and dislikes.

Children will be encouraged to point out the problems they face when they want to express themselves.

“We will select some schools with the aim of covering the rural and urban population. Both private and public schools will be covered. Girls and boys will have equal representation,” Gulati said.

In the next phase, the body will move to tackle the “trouble areas” identified in the first phase, the officials said.

The study is in tune with the NCERT’s new approach to school education, as prescribed by its National Curriculum Framework brought out two years ago, the officials said.

The framework lays emphasis on making the “learner the centre of the learning process”, Gulati said.