Our society requires an ability for us to interact and cooperate with the people in our surroundings. This applies to both grown-ups as well as young people. In school, the teachers have a responsibility to prepare pupils for the society and using cooperative learning could be one way to do this. The syllabus for the subject of Swedish invites for teachers to work with cooperative learning by formulating that the pupils should be given the opportunities to write and process texts individually and together with others, this does not appear in the syllabus for the subject of history. Hence our interest in examining cooperative learning in both subjects. The aim of this study is to examine whether cooperative teaching can foster pupils' knowledge development in the subjects’ history and Swedish for grades 4 - 6. The study will analyze the differences between teaching through traditional teaching methods and cooperative learning. To fulfill this aim the following questions were formulated: How does pupils' understanding of concepts in history differ after cooperative learning compared to after traditional teaching?How does pupils’ descriptive writing in Swedish differ after cooperative learning compared to after traditional teaching?The study is an intervention where pupils received teaching through traditional teaching as well as through teaching using cooperative learning. After each lesson, the pupils did a test and to enable the analysis these were collected to examine the differences. The results show, in accordance with previous research, that cooperative teaching did develop the pupils’ results in both subjects.

Researchers argue that students need to understand the language and the key concepts of each discipline to understand the academic content. The purpose of this study is to develop, analyze and evaluate a development project in civics. Therefore, the study answer following questions:  How do subject-specific concepts take place during the lessons according to the students? In what way can concept definition maps encourage students to talk about subject -specific concepts? How do students experience the work with concept definition maps? Two qualitative methods are used to answer the questions, both interviews and classroom observations. The interviews focus on how the students describe their experience with subject-specific concepts during civics lessons but also how they experience the work with concept definition maps which was implemented during the intervention. The observations onthe other hand show in what way the concept definition maps encourage students to talk about subject-specific concepts. The theoretical framework of the study is based on the sociocultural perspective and other theories that stress the importance of encouraging students to generate their own meaning of terms but also how the language develops in interaction with others.The result shows that the students often rely on the definition they get from their teacher orthe textbook but there is no room for students to explore the concepts themselves. All the students felt that the concept definition maps had good impact on their understanding of the subject-specific concepts. The results also showed that the there was a positive interdependence during the intervention where the students learned from each other’s prior knowledge and paths of thinking.

SammanfattningDenna studie syftar till att undersöka den övergripande frågeställningen: På vilket/vilka sätt kan skönlitteratur sägas ha en plats i den naturvetenskapliga undervisningen i grundskolans tidigare år?, samt delfrågorna: I vilken utsträckning förekommer, utifrån pedagogernas per-spektiv, ett begreppsutvecklande mål, med inriktning på naturvetenskapliga begrepp, i under-visningen med skönlitteratur, På vilket/vilka sätt ett arbete med skönlitteratur kan leda till be-greppsutveckling, och Vilka elevgrupper; elever med svenska som modersmål, elever med svenska som andraspråk eller språksvaga elever, som eventuellt kan gynnas av skönlitteratu-ren? Elever i år två, tre och fyra ingick i undervisningsförsök, som baserades på kortskrivning kring begreppen ”vatten” och ”miljöhot” före och efter högläsning av en skönlitterär text. Dessutom intervjuades två pedagoger som undervisat utifrån samma skönlitterära bok, samt Jan Nilsson, som är lärarutbildare på Malmö högskola och en stor förespråkare för skönlittera-tur som kunskapskälla. Undersökningarna antyder att vissa elever i stor utsträckning gynnas i sin begreppsutveckling, utifrån det skönlitterära innehållet. Det gick inte att urskilja vilken elevgrupp som gagnades mest. Det går att konstatera att elever med svenska som andraspråk relaterar till kontexten i den skönlitterära texten i stor utsträckning.Nyckelord: begreppsutveckling, elever med svenska som andraspråk, elever med svenska som modersmål, grundskolans tidigare år, naturvetenskaplig undervisning, skönlitteratur, språk-svaga elever. / AbstractThis study aim to investigate the overarching question: In what way/which ways can fiction have a place in science teaching in elementary school?, and the following questions: In what extension does a concept-developing goal, with a focus on science concepts, exist from teachers point of view in teaching with fiction?, In what way/which ways can teaching with fiction lead to concept development?, and Which groups of pupils; pupils with Swedish as their mother tongue, pupils with Swedish as a second language or pupils with language difficulties, possibly gain from the fiction?Pupils in grade two, three and four took part in a teaching experiment, based on short writing concerning the concepts “water” and “environmental threats” before and after the reading of a fiction text. Two teachers, who had been working with the same fiction, and Jan Nilsson, who is a teacher’s educator on the University of Malmo and a great spokesman for the use of fiction as a source of knowledge, were also interviewed. The results from the investigations imply that some pupils gain in a high extent, in their concepts development, from the content in the used fiction. It was not possible to make out which groups of pupils gained the most. It is possible to establish that pupils with Swedish as a second language relate to the context of the fiction in a high extent.Keywords: concept development, elementary school, fiction, pupils with Swedish as a second language, pupils with Swedish as their mother tongue, pupils with language difficulties, science teaching.