This thesis explores the everyday practice of school bullying by examining children's participation in peer group activities as well as in school-based anti-bullying activities within an educational setting. The empirical material is drawn from a long-term (1 year) ethnographic study conducted among preadolescent children in a 5th grade class in a Swedish elementary school. An ethnomethodological approach is used in analysis of ethnographically based fieldnotes, and in detailed analysis of video recordings collected during participant observations.    The first study examines, through elaborated investigation of a peer group's everyday peer encounters, how social exclusion is situated within the flow of intricate, subtle and seemingly innocent interactions. In this, the study offers detailed information about how girls' everyday peer group interactions, taken across a range of activities, may be consequential for the process of social exclusion.    The second study examines the interactional moral work accomplished within the situated practice of ART classroom sessions on moral reasoning used as part of the school's anti-bullying prevention program. The study contributes an understanding of the interactional managment of children's moral stance-taking, something that has previously been overshadowed by the quest to project the outcomes for individual children's moral reasoning. The third study examines a gossip dispute event, in which a group of girls take action against another girl for reporting school bullying to the teacher. The study demonstrates how, as the gossip dispute unfolds, the girls accused of bullying appropriate and even subvert the social organization of the school's anti-bullying program, and manage to turn the tables so that the girl initially reporting to be a victim of bullying is cast as an instigator, and the girls accused of the bullying as victims of false accusations.    The thesis illuminates the complex meanings and functions of social actions referred to as bullying within a school context and in the literature. Also, it sheds light on the difficulties that come with teachers' attempts to structure children's social relationships. All in all, the thesis illuminates the need to challange an individualistic approach to bullying, recognizing the social and moral orders children orient to in their everyday life at school.

The main purpose of this dissertation was to relate a study within the framework of Peer Student Group Research to the basic Process-Product Paradigm for Research on Teaching. Information about previous research within this field was given in the chapter on background. A total of 287 peer students at the Department of Education, Umeå University and at the teacher training colleges at Umeå and Luleå participated in this study. Thirty-one students worked individually and constituted a control group. The remaining 256 students were divided into 64 groups. Each group consisted of four students and was videoed during the problem-solving phase (60 minutes). The task dealt with a discipline case in the Swedish compulsory school. This case was discussed on the basis of four different psychological theories. A 2(Content, Group vs. Individual Content) X 2(Cohesiveness, High vs. Low Cohesiveness) X 2(Credit, Group vs. Individual Credit) design was used. A mediating model, i.e. Contribution(Analytical vs. Structural Contribution) X Persistence(Task Persistent vs. Task Non-Persistent Contribution) was used to observe the processes. Two of the videoed groups were analysed naturalistically. The results were measured psychometrically by means of an ANOVA. The ANOVA analysed main effects and interactions between the factors for the four process variables and for the product variable. The results of this study revealed the importance of studying Educational Productivity, i.e. both the process and the product. Furthermore, the study demonstrated that interactions could be discovered with psychometric methods but not with naturalistic methods. On the other hand, the naturalistic method revealed more sensitively how the group members worked and how they attempted to solve their task. The traditional assumption of group work vs. individual work was falsified. Individuals did better than groups on this type of problem. The results were discussed in both psychometric and naturalistic terms. / <p>Diss. Umeå : Umeå universitet, 1996</p> / digitalisering@umu

Magister Educationis (Adult Learning and Global Change) - MEd(AL) / This research paper is based on an investigation of the factors that enabled final year students to persist in a four-year degree programme (Foundation Programme). This study is important given that students who generally enrol for this programme terminate their studies before completion. This is a qualitative study in which interviewing was employed to collect the data. The conceptual framework is underpinned by Tinto’s model of student persistence with specific focus on student involvement through peer group interaction in the formal structure of the classroom. It also hones in on informal engagement which goes beyond the nature of the classroom. It further explores the relevance of academic integration, which encompasses a student’s ability to become well-grounded intellectually in the sphere of the institution in order to respond in a critical and systematic way to its educational demands. In addition, it further interrogates how peer group interaction and academic integration impact students’ ability to persist with their studies. Thus, the findings confirm that relationships exist between peer group interaction, academic integration, and persistence.