Students’ perceptions of just and unjust experiences in school

Abstract

The present study aimed to investigate the phenomenology of students’ just and unjust experiences in educational settings. Participants were 680 Chinese secondary school students (mean age 14.9 years) in Hong Kong. They were asked to report a just and an unjust event that happened to them in school. Eighteen categories of justice issues were identified. The major justice issues students reported were punishment, assessment of performance, interpersonal treatment, reward, and unjustified accusation. Students primarily used equity and equality rules to assess the fairness of punishment and assessment. Positive interpersonal treatment (e.g., with understanding and kindness) was perceived as just while negative interpersonal treatment as unjust. Students were also concerned with the fairness of distributive procedures, as shown by their use of seven procedural rules such as consistency, bias-suppression, accuracy, and representativeness. Two new procedural rules identified were confidentiality and transparency. The study has provided a comprehensive account of students’ perceptions of justice experiences in school, which was useful not only for the understanding of students’ justice perception, but also for the development of instruments that measure justice perception in educational settings.