Group learning - keeping children on track? Group work is an important part of education, giving students the opportunity to collaborate with their peers and share ideas to get a deeper understanding of academic content in a lesson. We spoke to Dr Nina Klang about her research into assessing the effectiveness of group learning in classes where there are students in need of additional support. The majority of
Swedish children go into mainstream schools when they enter formal education, including those with special educational needs. In many cases these children learn alongside their peers in the same class, an area of great interest to Dr Nina Klang, a senior lecturer in the Department of Education at Uppsala University in Sweden. “The participants in our study are children in mainstream educational settings, but we have data on the number of children with special needs in each class,” she outlines. As the Principal Investigator of a project based at the University, Dr Klang aims to gain deeper insights into how children with different educational abilities learn together, looking specifically at data on a group of 11-year olds. “Our primary aim in the project is to evaluate the effectiveness of cooperative learning, an inclusive group learning method, and to see how it works in classes where there are children in need of special support,” she explains. This method involves groupwork, structured to promote interdependence among group members, as each member has a degree of responsibility for the group’s work. By comparing outcomes for students Inclusion through learning in group - a study with mixed method design Funded by the Swedish Research Council (SRC). Dr Nina Klang, Project Coordinator Uppsala University Department of Education von Kraemers allé 1 A 752 37 Uppsala T: +46 18-471 1674 E: nina.klang@edu.uu.se W: https://www.edu.uu.se/ forskning/pedagogik/ps/ kooperativt_larande/
Dr Nina Klang is a researcher at the department of education at Uppsala university. She conducts research in the field of special educational needs. Her main research areas are social inclusion and instruction for children with intellectual disabilities.
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Cooperative learning class at one of the schools in the project.
A child may need someone to help them think things through. This is what happens in those small groups. who experienced this type of teaching with a control group, researchers aim to build a stronger evidence base on its effectiveness. “In the intervention group the students participated in groupwork, structured according to the principles of cooperative learning instruction,” says Dr Klang. In the study, which includes 958 students and 55 teachers, the research team are looking at outcomes in reading comprehension and mathematical problem solving, alongside investigating peer relations and perceptions of support from peers. “We used questionnaires where children had to name the classmates that they wanted to work with and who they wanted to be friends with,” outlines Dr Klang. “We also recorded how children actually worked in groups”. A further dimension of the project’s work involves analysing video recordings of groupwork in which children are engaged in collaborative tasks. The research team have made about 50 hours video footage of group work. “In one in-depth study of four children’s learning trajectories in mathematical problemsolving in groups, we could see that the children
gained knowledge as they got explanations from each other and used these in trying to solve problems,” continues Dr Klang. A child may be reluctant to ask a question of a teacher in front of the class when a new concept is unclear to them, or they may not have identified what they want to ask, but group work gives them the opportunity to learn from their peers. “A child may need someone to help them think things through. This is what happens in those small groups,” points out Dr Klang. Another important part of the project concerns how teachers in the study implemented the instructional method of cooperative learning. Although there are a lot of well-researched instructional methods, the challenge is to get them implemented in the classrooms. “We have interviewed 22 teachers in the intervention group about their experiences of implementing cooperative learning,” says Dr. Klang. The hope of Dr Klang and her colleagues is that the project may give a deeper understanding of how the cooperative learning method can be implemented to create inclusive classroom environments, where no child is left behind.
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