Group work in elementary science: Towards organisational principles for supporting pupil learning

By Christine Howe, Andrew K. Tolmie, Allen Thurston, Keith Topping, David Christie, Kay Livingston, Emma Jessiman, C. Donaldson. 2007

189 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Group work has been promoted in many countries as a key component of elementary science. However, little guidance is given as to how group work should be organised, and because previous research has seldom been conducted in authentic classrooms, its message is merely indicative. A study is reported, which attempts to address these limitations. Twenty-four classes of 10–12-year-old pupils engaged in programmes of teaching on evaporation and condensation, and force and motion. Both programmes were delivered by classroom teachers, and made extensive use of group work. Pupil understanding progressed from pre-tests prior to the programmes to post-tests afterwards, and results suggest that group work played a critical role. Organisational principles are extrapolated from the findings, which could be readily adopted in classrooms.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/87a5caadfaec2076056a3253d9b4b9f15c3c881b

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In Education

Citations in the corpus

‘Explain to your partner’: teachers' instructional practices and students' dialogue in small groups (2009, result): “Empirical findings from group-work studies demonstrate the critical relationship between explaining and achievement (see Fuchs et al., 1997; Howe et al., 2007; Howe & Tolmie, 2003; King, 1992; Nattiv, 1994; Slavin, 1987; Veenman, Denessen, van den Akker, & van der Rijt, 2005; Webb, 1991).”
Taking it to the classroom: Number board games as a small group learning activity (2012, background): “Collaboration with peers has been found to enhance learning under many circumstances (Azmitia & Montgomery, 1993; Howe et al., 2007; Rittle-Johnson & Star, 2009).”
Social effects of collaborative learning in primary schools (2010, methodology): “…of classroom dialogue were made using a time-sampling method focused on the incidence of 12 elements associated with productive outcomes in previous research (Howe & Tolmie, 1998; Tolmie, Thomson, Foot, Whelan, Morrison, & McLaren, 2005; for greater detail on these codes see Howe et al., 2007).”
Talk and the Development of Reasoning and Understanding (2008, background): “Human Development 2008;51:90–100 94 Mercer Outside the classroom, a range of experimental studies have tried to establish whether working and solving problems collaboratively helps children solve problems more effectively than when working alone, and whether this promotes individual learning. Typica”
Explaining the dialogic processes of teaching and learning: The value and potential of sociocultural theory (2012, result): “Indeed, the parallels across the two bodies of work are underlined in research reported in Howe et al. (2007): when the tasks that Howe and colleagues had previously used in experimental contexts (see earlier) were embedded in authentic, teacher-led programmes, they continued not only to boost…”
Teacher–Student Dialogue During Classroom Teaching: Does It Really Impact on Student Outcomes? (2019, methodology): “…of opinion has been shown repeatedly to support both academic attainment and general reasoning (e.g., Anderson, Howe, Soden, Halliday, & Low, 2001; Fung & Howe, 2014; Howe et al., 2007; Jurkowski & Hänze, 2015; Mercer, Dawes, Wegerif, & Sams, 2004; Mercer & Sams, 2006; Reznitskaya et al., 2009).”