Browsing by Author "Ukkonen, Siiri"

For a long time now, mixed and single sex groups in physical education have raised a lot of discussion about how the teaching of the subject should be organized. There are many opinions considering the superior grouping method, but the amount of official research data is still very limited. However, many studies have found similar results in the development of interaction and collaboration skills and a better team spirit between students in a mixed group. For this reason, the aim of this study was to find out whether the classroom teachers experience that the mixed group in physical education influences the cohesion and group dynamics of the class. The aim was also to find out what kind of concrete effects the mixed groups were seen to have on these phenomena. The study was carried out by using qualitative research methods. The research data con-sisted of semi-structured thematic interviews with six classroom teachers. The data was analyzed for each research question either by classification or by thematic analysis. The majority of the teachers felt that the mixed group in physical education had a positive effect on the class cohesion and group dynamics. Some felt that the effect was somewhat visible, while others felt that it was very significant. One-third of the teachers could not say if the mixed group really influenced these things. All teachers gave examples of the positive effects of the mixed group on class cohesion and group dynamics, regardless of whether they felt the effects were certainly due to the mixed group. The mixed group was felt to de-velop students' group action skills, sense of equality and gender equality, social relation-ships, and classroom atmosphere, which are components of the phenomena under study. Teachers also felt it necessary to emphasize that even though there were positive effects, the mixed group physical education has not had an effect on the challenging behavior of the more problematic students or on the pair-choosing situations, where the students still wanted to form mainly same sex pairs. No negative effects were experienced considering the mixed groups. This study provides one perspective on the review of teaching groups in physical education and can assist in the design of the teaching arrangements of the sub-ject.