Browsing by Author "Vuorela, Kaisa"

Goals. The objective of this Master´s Thesis was to examine the development of learning to learn and thinking skills of 5th graders with special needs during the school year intervention. Another objective was to examine which thinking and learning to learn skills would develop and which not. The specific interest was to find out differences and similarities between the students with special educational needs and general education students. The theories used in this thesis are Piaget´s and Demetriou´s theories of cognitive development. Thinking and learning to learn skills and development of those have been current topics in studies of behavioural sciences. There have been few intervention studies in Finland too, where the de-velopment of children´s learning to learn skills have been examined during several years. In six-years intervention study showed how the future working life demands thinking and reasoning skills for problem solving, and it can be influenced already at the primary school (Vainikainen, Wüstenberg, Kupiainen, Hotulainen, & Hautamäki, 2015). In the new national core curriculum (2014) the transversal competence is essential and one of the multidisciplinary modules is thinking and learning to learn. (POPS 2014, 20.) Methods. The participants of this study consisted of the 5th graders in the municipalities of Akaa, Lappeenranta and Liperi, who responded to the evaluation study of learning to learn during the school year 2017–2018 (N=245). In this study those students who were in the lowest quarter regarding to tasks of competence were separated as own group. The compaction of data was executed with online tasks of competence and online inquiries related to attitude both in autumn and spring. The data was analysed by using the independent samples t-test. Results and conclusions. There were no significant differences between the experimental and the control group. The only variable which exceeded the significant level, was deduction. In the comparison of the lowest and the highest quartet´s results there were significant changes in the group variables of competence. Instead no significant changes between the beliefs were noticed. Compared to the earlier research, it seems one-year intervention study is too short to show the differences.