Browsing by Author "Järvenpää, Linda"

The interest to do this research began from my personal interest towards school dogs and animalassisted pedagogy. In the recent years, school dogs have also been featured in the media and in a positive sense. The aim of this research is to find out what kind of effects there may be when a god is brought to a classroom environment. The target is to gather the results from previous research about what kind of findings have the researchers made about the effects of a dog as part of the classroom. The aim is to provide information which may be needed if a teacher is considering to have a schooldog in the classroom. The type of this research is a literature review. The data consisted five research articles published between the year 2002 and 2013 in all of which the subject of the study was a classroom with a dog integrated to the daily life. The method I used to analyze the data was thematizing. I separated six themes out from the results of the previous researches based on similarities and differences. Based on my literature review it seems that schooldogs can have various positive effects in the classroom environment. In this literature review, no negative signs or negative effects of the schooldog in the classroom were found. The positive effects discovered were for example diminishing of aggressive behavior of the children, signs of having more control over expressing strong emotions and the increase of school satisfaction.