Students’ perspectives of un/fairness in group work assessment are known to be related to the issues of varied contributions in group work and how to discern each student’s contribution or knowledge from the group’s joint work. Students’ perceptions of un/fairness in group work assessment are important since it relates to their motivation.

This study aims to investigate upper secondary students’ perspectives on un/fairness in group work assessment. In the study, 129 upper secondary school students in Sweden between the ages of 15 and 16 years participated. The students were interviewed in 33 focus groups. The interviews were thematically analysed.

The study’s findings illustrate how ambition, motivation and friendship relations in groups may vary and cause what students perceive as unfairness. Varied ambitions and motivations among group members also appear to breed situations where group members’ contributions to group work may vary, which also is perceived by students as unfair. Other factors that can contribute to a perception of unfairness are when knowledge levels vary among group members or friendship relations. How un/fairness is perceived also depends on the level at which the assessment is implemented, group or individual level. The greatest experience of unfairness is generated by implementing group assessment.

Summary of the book:

This volume captures contemporary global developments in cooperative learning (CL) across varied educational contexts, levels, and disciplines. Cooperative learning is widely recognized as a pedagogical practice that promotes socialization and learning among students, from kindergarten to tertiary education and across different subject domains. With chapters from contributors throughout the Global North and South, this comprehensive volume offers a wide-ranging perspective and addresses a range of cooperative learning pedagogies including relational, online, and peer learning, STAD, the Jigsaw model, and dialogic talk. The chapters draw on novel empirical research and theory to highlight best practices in cooperative learning, whilst also considering the challenges, limitations, and factors which drive or inhibit learner engagement and success. Consistent attention is given to the pivotal role of the educator in implementing cooperative learning to maximum benefit to enhance students’ affective, social, cognitive, and metacognitive learning. Thus, this book will appeal to scholars and researchers across a variety of subjects; and will provide an additional benefit to in-service and pre-service educators who already practice cooperative learning in their classrooms, as well as those who are interested in implementing the model. 

This study aims to investigate how the courses in didactics of mathematics in preschool and primary teacher education create conditions for preservice teachers to develop professional knowledge in an interactive learning process that integrates the knowledge domains of mathematical subject knowledge and pedagogical mathematical knowledge. An analysis of 20 course documents and 8 focus group interviews with students have been done. The results show that the intentions in the documents create conditions for the students to develop mathematical subject knowledge. Still, they were given inferior conditions for pedagogical mathematical knowledge. In the focus groups, perceptions emerged among the participants about a changed view of mathematics during the education, from being an abstract theoretical subject to a subject to be explored and discovered through various practical exercises and activities. As support for transferring their newly discovered perception, it is important that the students participate in core practices to bridge the gap between theoretical and practical knowledge in teacher education. The continued development of such core practices, in which student teachers can integrate professional knowledge and skills into their education, is an important implication of this study.

Vid matematikutbildningen i lärarprogrammen vid Högskolan Väst (HV) genomförs ett utvecklings- och forskningsprojekt (med flera delstudier) för att stödja lärarstudenter att utveckla specifik yrkeskunskap som förbereder dem för undervisningens komplexitet. Kontexten i den här studien är förskoleklassen, den skolform som ska knyta samman förskolans och skolans pedagogik. I en granskning av undervisningen i förskoleklassen (Skolinspektionen, 2015) framkom att endast en fjärdedel av eleverna får en undervisning som motsvarar läroplanens övergripande mål för kunskaper. Det finns därför ett stort behov av att utveckla undervisningen i förskoleklass. Detta gäller särskilt undervisningen i matematik.

Teoretisk utgångspunkt i projektet är Banduras teori om självtillit i att undervisa (1997). Forskningen behandlar individens föreställningar om sin kompetens och inte den reella undervisningsförmågan. Det finns dock en tydlig koppling mellan lärares uppfattningar om sin kompetens och vad deras elever presterar. I studien undersöker vi lärarstudenters tilltro till deras egen förmåga att undervisa i matematik och hur den förändras när studenterna får genomföra micro-teaching inför sin VFU (Pekdağ et al., 2020).

Studien inleddes med att studenterna fick undervisning i matematik och därefter med handledningsstöd planera en matematiklektion. Lärarutbildare och studentkollegor gav feedback via ett strukturerat observationsprotokoll i ett intilliggande hybridklassrum. Samma undervisningssession genomfördes sedan på VFU där läraren observerade och gav feedback. Datainsamling har skett genom fokusgrupper för att fånga studenternas upplevelse av micro-teaching och om/hur den förändrat deras tillit till att undervisa i matematik. Teoretiskt analysverktyg är fyra aspekter som stöd för utveckling av självtillit (Bandura, 1997).

Generellt upplevde studenterna micro-teaching som lärorikt och vill gärna möta liknande upplägg igen. Kontinuerlig återkoppling på ett begränsat innehåll upplevdes positivt. Studenterna tyckte tekniken med micro-teaching var en bra lärsituation, som blandade teori och praktik samt gav dem nya perspektiv på deras egen undervisning, en “levande kunskap”.

Group work can provide students with valuable opportunities for cooperative learning both of knowledge and abilities related to academic factors and of collaborative skills. However, the requirement from the curriculum to assess students’ knowledge andability individually in group work is a challenging and complex task for teachers. In addition, research on group work assessment in educational context is a neglected research area, and especially individual group work assessment. Accordingly, little theoretical knowledge or useful tools have been provided to assist teachers in this important but difficult task. A special challenge, compared to traditional assessment in education, seems to be how to discern individual knowledge from the joint work when assessing. One way for teachers to assess students during group work, and simultaneously promote their further work and learning, is to provide them with individual formative assessment, by employing feedback. Recent studies indicates that teachers’ feedback to the students also may support individual accountability,i.e., facilitates students’ ability to work more independently in group work where everyone is responsible for their part of the work but also for the group's joint assignments. Against this backdrop, the aim of this presentation is to explore and problematize in what way teachers’ formative written feedback, on students’ individual work during group work promotes or impedes collaboration and individual accountability.

Social Interdependence Theory emphasizing positive interdependence as means for promoting collaboration as well as individual accountability for well-functioning groupwork, together with Shute’s (2008) guidelines for useful feedback, are utilized as overarching theoretical perspectives. Shute claims that there are several types of feedback that can be delivered and a large variability of the effects for the students. Useful feedback depends, according to Shute (2008), on motive, opportunity and means, that is, meet the student’s needs and is given when the student is prepared to use the feedback. 

The study focuses on written formative feedback as means for formative assessment. Data were obtained through 149 feedback documents from six teachers. Feedback was given during a group work assignment when students were working on the individual part of the common group task. The teachers were asked to use their own.

The results display that the written feedback to the students includes comments on following levels: individual (“you”), group (“your group) and “not distinct” (not possibleto discern which level). Furthermore, the results display that the teachers convey feedback in manageable units, focusing on the task to enhance the quality of the work or to promote collaboration and individual accountability. Thus, the paper contributes with relevant Nordic educational research by presenting theoretical knowledge on the sparsely researched area concerning written individual feedback as a means for formative assessment in connection with group work assessment.

The assessment of individual knowledge and abilities should be frequently undertaken when learning is developed in interactions with other students, such as in group work and/or cooperative learning. Previous research reveals that group work assessment is a neglected research area, and this applies in particular to group work assessment interventions studies. The focus of this article is methodological, and its aim is to provide a reflective and critical account of a group work assessment intervention project, and the implications of the different choices made in this process. The intervention project that was scrutinized had a mixed-method longitudinal quasi-experimental design, and interventions in the form of shorter educational sessions were central to the project. Both qualitative and quantitative data were collected, analyzed, and compiled. The methodological issues discussed and problematized were the importance of (a) establishing collaboration with teachers; (b) well-thought-out and delimited methodological choices, and subsequent consequences; and (c) including both teachers and students to secure successful effects of the interventions. As a result of the study, it was concluded that intervention could be beneficial as a means of increasing the scientific knowledge in relation to intervention studies, and also to the emerging discourse on group work assessment.

New parents are offered parental education groups as a way to support their transition to parenthood. Interactive approaches in these groups are of importance, but studies have reported a lack of activities that support interaction. Cooperative learning is a structured method when working with groups and based on five elements essential to maximizing the cooperative potential of groups. The aim was to investigate the leadership skills of child healthcare nurses as leaders for parental education groups, their ideas about creating conditions for wellfunctioning groups, and what is required to achieve this. The results were analyzed and discussed using social interdependence theory as a framework and especially the five elements of cooperative learning. Further, the study used a qualitative descriptive design, and eight qualitative interviews were analyzed deductively using thematic analysis. The results showed that in their narratives the nurses display vocational knowledge and describe conditions important for their groups from a cooperative learning perspective. Nevertheless, the results indicate that the nurses had difficulty explicitly instructing parents to use their personal experiences and social skills to get groups to function effectively. Knowledge developed in the workplaces from the experience of leading groups is mostly implicit, and formal knowledge and awareness of leadership is necessary for development of the role.