Group Work in Scotland        

  Scottish Social Pedagogic Research into Grouping (ScotSPRinG)

 

Further Details about the Project

 

Group work has great potential as an educational resource, but is typically not well employed. The Teaching and Learning Research Programme Phase II SPRinG project "Improving the Effectiveness of Pupil Groups in Classrooms" is intended to establish the conditions necessary for group activities to produce definite educational benefits (in terms of learning and quality of classroom relationships), and to design ways of helping teachers to introduce effective group work into their classes. The first part of the project has been completed, and attention is now focused on assessing how far programmes of in-service support for teachers wanting to implement group activities at Key Stages 1-3 of the National Curriculum in England are successful in producing effective group work.

 

East teachers involved in groupwork on CPD Day1.

However, this research is only being carried out in schools in urban areas of the South-East of England. Research under the present proposal will extend the investigation to science teaching with 10 to 12 year olds in three types of primary school in Scotland.

These are:

1) schools in rural communities where small pupil numbers mean that classes are made up of a mixture of ages, and group work takes place between older and younger children;

2) urban schools where variations in intake each year mean that there are classes with similar characteristics, but children are less likely to know each other outside of school;

3) urban schools with normal class organisation, where group work takes place between children of the same age.

 

Interest here centres on the fact that group work between children of different ages tends to lead to older children tutoring the younger ones, rather than to more equal collaboration between them, which is what the programmes of support for teachers are designed to encourage. This might not matter, since tutoring can also be beneficial, but different forms of support may be needed to produce these benefits. Moreover, tutoring tends to depend on the children involved not knowing each other too well, so that the more expert status taken on by the older child is accepted by the younger. This might present problems in small rural schools, where children are likely to have much greater out-of-school contact across a range of ages.

 

The research will therefore serve to test how far support programmes of the kind developed in England might need to be modified to promote effective group work across the types of context more typically found in Scotland, adding at the same time to understanding of the principles involved.

 

Teachers from up to 12 rural and 12 urban schools will be recruited to take part in the research. These teachers will work through programmes of in-service support based on those used in the English research, with the object of designing and implementing a series of group work activities in science (where group work is more necessary because of lack of equipment) for use with their classes, to run over a whole school year.

 

Feedback to the East teachers on a workshop activity on CPD Day 1.

The effects of these support programmes in the different types of school will be examined by looking at tests of learning in science and in maths (to see if there are any spill-over effects), and by observing how children interact with each other in class, and how this changes over time as group work schemes are introduced. Results will be used to judge how the support programmes need to be adapted for a) schools of all types where groups consist of a mixture of ages, and b) rural schools in particular.

 

Email us with comments or questions. We are especially keen to hear from teachers currently working in Scottish primary schools. You can do this from the 'Contact Us' page.