Browsing by Subject "Puhe"

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.