Browsing by Subject "ongelmanratkaisu"

Aims. Problem solving plays a key role in the foundations of the basic education curriculum and is one of the seven main objectives of mathematics teaching. (National Board of Education 2014) The student's positive attitude towards mathematics has been found to be related to better learning outcomes (Niemi, 2008). A teacher who is more positive about mathematics is more likely to get his or her students excited about studying mathematics (Hattie 2012). This study examines how students with dual-grade teachers in mathematics differ from the national level in problem-solving skills and mathematical attitudes in lower elementary school. Methods. The study is quantitative in nature. All elementary classes involved in the study were taught by a teacher who completed the dual qualification of mathematics. The material was collected mainly through electronic forms sent to teachers. Problem-solving skills were tested with the tests of the 2018-2019 Kangaroo Math Competition and attitudes to study mathematics with Fennema-Sherman's (1976) scale of mathematical attitudes. The attitude survey measured attitudes towards mathematics, pupils’ confidence in mathematics, and the engagement of mathematics teaching. The data were analyzed with IBM SPSS Statistics. Results and conclusions. In the problem-solving test, the performance level of the experimental group was lower than the national data. In the attitude survey there was no statistically significant difference between the groups on attitudes towards mathematics. There was no statistically significant difference found in students confidence in their own mathematical skills but the students' engagement was stronger for the research material with the result being statistically significant. Based on this study it appears that the qualifications of dual-qualified lower elementary school teachers find teaching more engaging than Finnish students in general, and that dual-qualified teachers are more successful in implementing gender equality.

Goal of the study. This is a qualitative case study of problem solving and interaction in a play pedagogical application called the "city game". Problem solving interaction is viewed through the concept of position. The research questions are: 1. What kind of problems emerge in the "city game"? 2. What kind of social positions do the participants have during problem solving activities? Many researchers of the learning sciences emphasize the importance of collaboration, peer-learning, agency, active participation, sense of belonging, and problem based learning methods in school pedagogy. The goal of the thesis is to understand how these pedagogical ideas appear in the "city game". By analyzing the problem solving situations and the positions of the participants, I examine the learning possibilities the "city game" might offer in school context. Method. The data of this study was collected in a play pedagogical school that is a result of a research project started by Pentti Hakkarainen, professor of pedagogics. The children in the class are 4–8 years old, and there are four adults working with the class. The studied game is called the "city game". It consists of the adults and the children together creating a city with five different service points, like a candy store, a bank, and a spa. Some of the participants participate in a role of customer service personnel, and the others (all of the adults and some of the children) wander around as customers and buy different services and goods. The data consists of a video recording of one play episode (1 ½ hours). From this video, I selected problem solving episodes and analyzed them in terms of quality of the problem. By the methods of interactions analysis I then determined the positions of the participants. Results and discussion. There were many different kinds of problems in the data. Some of them were well-structured (typical in school), and others more ill-structured or open ended (more typical in real life settings), and the solvers used many different kinds of strategies. Most of the problems emerged and were solved in collaboration by children. The children participated in the problem solving in various positions, and some of them were more active than the others. The adults scaffolded the problem solving, but withheld from actually solving the problem for the children. The play and its roles were obviously very motivating, as the children stuck to their roles very persistently, even in difficult problem solving situations. The play roles also affected the problem solving positions, for example, solving a problem was seen more as the responsibility of the service personnel, who were usually the most active solvers. In the light of the previous studies, the problems in the "city game" promote deep learning by understanding, and inner motivation. As a problem solving environment the "city game" promotes agency, active participation, sense of belonging, collaboration, and peer-learning, all of which have been confirmed to have very positive influence on children's learning and well-being. According to these results, the "city game" and other play pedagogical applications similar to it can be seen as a highly recommended learning environment in comprehensive school, as well as in preschool.

The aim of this master's thesis was to study pupils' interaction and problem solving during a programming project. The study of interaction was limited to talk between two pupils, in which three types of talk were sought: disputational, cumulative, and exploratory talk. Of these three, exploratory talk is the most conducive to learning. Problem solving is seen as a process consisting of several stages. These stages may proceed linearly from the previous stage, but according to the current understanding, dynamic, more flexible movement between the problem-solving stages is more common. In this thesis, talk and problem solving are first examined separately. Finally, it is studied how much the three types of talk occur at different stages of problem solving. The subjects of the study were two sixth-grader pupils in an elementary school in Helsinki. The pupils first practiced programming and then, as the final output of the project, developed their own emotion meter using GoGo Board, a programmable device. Video cameras were used for data collection and qualitative content analysis was used as the method of analysis. The number of problem-solving stages was much higher than the number of types of talk. The amount of the three types of talk were surprisingly equal. Exploratory talk increased and disputational talk decreased as the programming project progressed. This can mark a development in pupils’ interaction skills during the project. The most represented problem-solving stages were “constructing” and “testing”, i.e., the pupils’ activities focused on hands-on doing. Problem solving followed a dynamic transition between stages. At different stages of problem solving, slightly different types of talk were emphasized. The share of exploratory talk in the last stage of problem solving, i.e. the evaluation stage, was higher than in the other stages.