We Want More Researchers!

Paper

Students who independently researched a topic that appealed to them, created an essey about their work and the results, and who presented the work to others can undoubtedly be classified as talented students. In the introduction, we emphasize the importance of skills and ways of thinking, which are strengthened in the participants of education through research activity. Due to the importance of these alone, at Gimnazija Poljane we want to have as many applicants as possible for research assignments, and above all, for the students to complete the applied assignments with the help of mentors and publicly defend their results.
At the same time, we note that it is necessary to address the four key factors. These are:
- student's motivation for the decision to do research
- teacher's motivation for mentoring the student researcher
- student's persistence, necessary for the completion of the task and
- support of the school management.
In this paper we take a closer look at each of these factors. We are well versed in motivating students to apply for the assignment, and with the methods used we obtain a relatively large number of them. Motivating teachers is more difficult, but fortunately, the vast majority of teachers are engaged enough to take on additional work, i.e. mentoring student researchers. Let's put it straight, that according to our experience, the most difficult task is to influence the student's persistence. The support of the school's management is also important, especially by recognizing and supporting the necessity of a wide-ranging research activity. In this paper, we present our approach at Gimnazija Poljane in order to direct as many students as possible to research, and what our results are.