The purpose of this study is to investigate what kind of idea a group of students in third grade, who attends a school in the Stockholm area, have on group work in school and how they think it affects their learning. The study is based on two questions: What opinion do the students have about group work? What opinion do the students have about how group work affects their learning? The method I have used to retrieve information has been to interview six different students, where the interviews were both individually and in groups. I started by interviewing students individually and then had a group interview. The idea with the group interview was to end it all with a brief discussion about the thoughts that came up during the individual interviews. I chose a selection of six students, four girls and two boys which they all were at the age of 9 and go to the same school. The socio-cultural and structural perspectives, is those theoretical perspectives that my study is based on. I will describe how student’s group work can be linked to theories of Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky. Piaget's theory focuses on the student's development as the primary constructive, while Vygotsky presents student’s development and socio-cultural. From these two perspectives, I will highlight how students get affected by each other in the context of group work. The core concept in my study is based on cooperative learning, which is a new approach to group work. I will also define other concepts such as group and group work. The results of this study show that students connect group work to collaborative situations both in and outside of school. The learning was connected to both the formal and informal learning in groups. According to the students the concept of teamwork is to work together, and many times the students connected the teamwork with collaborative situations outside of school rather than in school. Students see group work as both an obstacle and an opportunity for learning. Five of the six students were united on the fact that group work in schools do not work because they rarely collaborate. Based on the results of the interviews the students connected "good cooperation" with "learning", and it mostly focused on the informal learning that occurred outside of school. While the concept of "group work in school" was connected to something more complicated. This study shows how student learning is affected by group work in and outside of school.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:sh-21009 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Merza, Linda |
| Publisher | Södertörns högskola, Lärarutbildningen |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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