Browsing by Subject "tutkiva oppiminen"

This is a research on how the manifestation of critical thinking skills of secondary school students was supported in the different iterations of the Global Challenges phenomenom-based learning course. Phenomenom-based learning (PhBL) is one alternative on how to teach critical information gathering and processing skills – also known as knowledge building – which are vital in the modern society. The implemented models of PhBL, however, lack foundational research and they’ve been criticized to be a waste of time. This thesis introduces how PhBL can be carried out in a pedagogically meaningful way by utilizing the theories of project-based learning, inquiry-based learning and collaborative knowledge building. Three years of design work resulted in a research-based model on how to organize a PhBL course for secondary education. The model is justified and criticized in the framework of the national curriculum and previous research. This thesis follows the design-based research (DBR) protocol by describing the needs, different processes and the final product of the design. Research material was gathered from the Global Challenges course that was organized from 2017 to 2019 by Helsinki University Science Education Center for students of secondary schools. The gathered material is mostly qualitative, constisting of the course materials, participant observation carried out by the university students and narrative self-evaluations, course artefacts and summative feedbacks from the secondary school students. In the first iteration 10 out of 19 attending students were observed, whereas in the second iteration all seven attending students were observed. The observation reports of the first two iterations were subjected to empirical problem analysis. In the third iteration participant observation was no longer carried out, and all material consists of the course assignments that the 17 attending students submitted in to the created MOOC web-learning environment. The manifestation of the critical thinking skills on the secondary school students’ course assignments in 2nd and 3rd iterations were comparatively analyzed with The Vocabulary of Critical Thinking Skills (2009) by Phil Washburn. A successfull practice of phenomenom-based learning required well defined structure and guidance. The goals of the course were met only partially in the first iterations, because the freedom and fun didn’t motivate the students to invest in the knowledge building process. The elements implemented in the last iteration supported meeting the goals considerably more efficiently than the model of free knowledge creation. The manifestation of the critical thinking skills was connected to the ability to follow the structures modelled after the Progressive inquiry. The conclusion was that the structures of PhBL must be built up carefully, if they are to challenge the traditional subject learning model in a pedagogically meaningful way.

The purpose of this study was to investigate explaining among third grade primary school students undergoing inquiry-based science project. Secondly, the aim of the study was to observe the ways with which the teacher sought to promote and scaffold explanation development by students. Previous studies have shown that self-made explanations have an impact on learning outcomes. Explaining has a particularly important role in science education in which the starting point for teaching should be in utilizing students' own experiences, skills and knowledge. This is a qualitative case study written from a socio-cultural point of view using video research as a method. The class in question had 18 students. Material was collected during the spring 2008, when a science project was carried out in the class. In this study I analyzed 6 classes all related to the project. I categorized the explanations using a modified literature-based classification system. These categories were descriptive and developmental intuitive explanations, descriptive and developmental unifying explanations, descriptive and developmental scientific explanations and unclassified explanations. In order to find out the possible methods the teacher used as scaffolds, I further analyzed all the developmental scientific explanations made by the students. I analyzed discovered scaffolding methods using transcribed examples of the classroom discourse. The results indicated that students' explanations changed during the monitoring period. Intuitive explanations and unifying explanations had a relatively high share in the first lesson, after which it decreased. Nevertheless, this category of explanations did not totally disappear either. The number of descriptive scientific explanations stayed relatively high throughout the analyzed period but the share of the developmental scientific explanations increased. By using certain methods the teacher seemed to support the creation of developmental scientific explanations. Those methods were teacher-led questions, mediating conversation and invocation of students' experience and expertise. The study offers examples of what kind of a role explaining has in practical school work, as well as ways how teachers can support students' explanation development during the classes.

Recent studies show that motivation, emotion, and interest are engaged in learning. Engagement to learning is a complex entity in which the dynamic interaction between the student and the learning environment is central. In addition, students` ability to influence their own learning, mutual cooperation, and meaningful experience in learning strengthens engagement in learning. Recent curriculum on behalf of transversal competence underlines central meaning of these factors in teaching. This is also topical, as the learning outcomes and motivation of children and young people have fallen in recent years. The purpose of this thesis is to study the factors involved engagement in comprehensive school setting during science learning project on 5.–6. grades. The data (n = 74) was collected in spring 2018 from a local school in a metropolitan area during the phenom-enal science learning process in classes 5–6, which was carried out according to inquiry-based learning. The Experience Sampling Form was developed for this thesis in order to study the students' internal experiences during the learning process. Students responded to the questionnaire six times during the five-week working pe-riod, and field notes were also used during analysis of the thesis. Experience Sampling data was used to gener-ate sum variables (motivation, academic emotions, and interest factors), the interconnection was examined by the Spearmans` rank correlation coefficient. On the second phase, the link between the variables and the stages of work (inquiry based learning) was examined by the Kruskall Wallis test and the paired Mann-Whitney U test. The connection between variables and working methods (researching team, whole class) were examined with Cross-Tabulation Analysis, also observations from field notes were produced and compared with the work stages (teacher guidance, information retrieval, evaluation). The formed variables´ correlation is statistically significant to a large extent with each other, so it is justified to investigate these synergies. On the other hand there were no statistically significant differences between work phases and variables, exception was apathy variable, which had statistically significant difference be-tween question making and evaluation. In terms of working habits, students' experiences (somewhat, much) were evenly distributed with activity, insertion and ability variables. Apathy was less experienced and student experienced both ways of working mainly rewarding. Experience of import was less experienced during the en-tire class work and student had less autonomy experience during both working methods. According to findings, interaction and concentration were the most abundant during the work of the research team. The results of this thesis confirm that learning is not about individual factors, but about the complex process of the student and the learning environment. In addition, the students' ability to actively influence their own work and the students’ mutual work reinforce engagement in learning. In summary, it can also be said that phe-nomenal learning according to inquiry-based learning strengthens students' autonomy, interaction and engage-ment to learning. This is significant, because the current curriculum in particular challenges the implementation of teaching to be more cooperative. However, more information about learning is still needed. The purpose of this thesis could be applied more widely in the field of education research so that the engagement in learning could be explored longer term and in among several classes.

The study examines one case of students' experiences from the activity in a collaborative learning process in a networked learning environment, and explores whether or not the experiences explain the participation or lack of participation in the activities. As a research task the students' experiences in the database of the networked learning environment, participating in its construction, and the ways of working needed to build the database, were examined. To contrast the students' experiences, their actual participation in the building of the database was clarified. Based on actual participation, groups more active and more passive than average were separated, and their experiences were compared to each other. The research material was collected from the course Cognitive and Creative Processes, which was offered to studentsof the Department of Textile Teacher Education in University of Helsinki, and students of the Departments of Teacher Education Units giving textile education in Turku, Rauma and Savonlinna in the beginning of 2001. In this course, creativity was examined from a psychological and sosiocultural context with the aim of realizing a collaborative progressive inquiry process. The course was held in a network-based Future Learning Environment (Fle 2) except for the starting lecture and training the use of the learning environment. This study analyzed the learning diaries that the students had sent to the tutor once a week for four weeks, and the final thoughts written into the database of the learning environment. Content analysis was applied as the research method. The case was enriched from another point of view by examining the messages the students had written into the learning environment with the social network analysis. The theoretical base of the study looks at the research of computer-supported collaborative learning, the conceptions of learning as a process of participation and knowledge building, and the possibilities and limitations of network-based learning environments. The research results show, that both using the network-based learning environment and collaborative ways of studying were new to the students. The students were positively surprised by the feedback and support provided by the community. On the other hand, they also experienced problems with facelessness and managing the information in the learning environment. The active students seemed to be more ready for a progressive inquiry process. It can be seen from their attitudes and actions that they have strived to participate actively and invested into the process both from their own and the community's point of view. The more passive students reported their actions to get credits and they had a harder time of perceiving the thoughts presented in the net as common progression. When arranging similar courses in the future, attention should be paid to how to get the students to act in ways necessary for knowledge building, and different from more traditional ways of studying. The difficulties of students used to traditional studying methods to adapt to collaborative knowledge building were evident on the course Cognitive and Creative Processes.