Conference Agenda

Children’s voices are important, and they have the right to be heard (Petersen & Kornerup, 2021). For example, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) states that children have the right to express themselves and be heard in matters that affect their lives (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 1990, Article 12). At the same time, research shows that students would like to have the opportunity to talk about teaching and learning, and that they have important insights to contribute to the development of the learning environment in school (Rudduck, 2007). This applies, for example, to how students can be involved and participate more/better (Ulvseth, 2019).

This presentation analyzes how students experience working together in pairs. Furthermore, it discusses methodological considerations in relation to getting students to talk in interviews about learning in pairs. Thus, a 3-year research project named “SYKL” (which is an acronym for Systematized Reciprocal Peer Tutoring) is presented, in which 25 teachers and supervisors have been trained to teach mathematics and science in 4. grade in a new way, after which they had to test the intervention for 13 weeks.

The way of organizing the reciprocal peer tutoring based on subject didactics is new. To fulfill the role as a tutor the student is given prompt cards and hints for the specific task prepared by the teacher. In science and mathematics didactics, there has been a focus on inquiry-based teaching for years, while the dialogic interaction in relation to the inquiry-based teaching has been more neglected (Lehesvuori et al., 2018). Teachers use groupwork on a regular basis. While doing so teachers rarely employ explicit systematic peer tutoring strategies aligned with the academic topics. Even though teachers put an effort into matching students that will work together productively, they often neglect to provide systematic guidance as to how the students should cooperate (EVA, 2021).

Only few studies examine the benefits of peer tutoring from both an academic and social perspective. A systematic review (Tiftikci, 2021) confirms that most studies are carried out with either the aim of measuring the academic benefit or the significance for the students' social relations. In the SYKL project, the ambition was to support social relations through the academic work, and therefore we have investigated both the academic and social benefits and possible connections.

The presentation addresses two research questions:

1. How do students experience to participate in reciprocal peer tutoring (SYKL)?
2. What methodological barriers and potentials can be identified when students are to talk about their experience of participating in reciprocal peer tutoring (SYKL)?

The starting point is based on theory of communities of practice (Lave and Wenger, 2003) and inclusive forms of practice (Booth, 2011; Harris, Carrington, and Ainscow 2017) as well as research on peer tutoring (Thurston et. al, 2020). SYKL builds on a sociocultural and dialogic foundation (Bakhtin, 1981) and focuses on the inquiry-based aspects of mathematics and science. According to Alexander (2020), dialogic teaching must be practiced in a way that is adapted to the specific subject, as there may be variations in the way of asking questions, arguing, and applying subject concepts in, for example, mathematics and science.

With a term inspired from mathematics didactics, it can be said that SYKL tries to clarify the socio-academic norms (Schmidt, 2015), which means the expectations that exist in the academic community. These can be norms such as explaining and justifying proposed solutions for tasks as well as listening actively (Makar & Fielding-Wells, 2019).

International studies in inclusive education in mathematics point out that students have unequal access to learn and participate (Cin & Cifti 2017; Reinholz & Shah 2018; Rubel 2016; Lambert 2015). In the most dominant form of math education, teachers explain the task and give a few examples, after which the students work individually. Lambert (2015) and Schmidt (2016) argue that the academic norms in mathematics – like remembering rules and working individually without hesitating – favours certain students, while students with a more creative and problem-solving approach are excluded. Lim et al. (2015) state that learning and the sense of belonging is promoted, when the teacher develops classroom norms and establishes a learning environment in which students recognize divergent thinking.

As a contribution to the international studies this paper presents some of the results from a three-year research project in a Danish context. The project investigates how an intervention (SYKL) with reciprocal peer tutoring in mathematics and science in 4th grade affects the students' engagement, participation and learning outcomes. In contrast to most international peer tutoring projects, SYKL focus on both social relations and academic inclusion at the same time.

SYKL is based on a sociocultural perspective in learning (Vygotsky, 2019) and emphasize the importance of inquiry-based learning (Blomhøj, 2021). In SYKL students are specifically taught how to help each other and engage in academic conversations when working in pairs. SYKL is inspired by interventions with peer tutoring, where students take on different roles (Thurston et al., 2007; Thurston et al., 2020). The students are assigned one of two positions, either as tutor or tutee. To fulfill the role of ‘coach’ or ‘helper’, the tutor receives prompt cards with generic questions and academic hints for solving the specific task. During a lesson students switch roles so that both can participate in meaning making and commit to the relation.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate students’ assisting strategies in SYKL and explore how these strategies promote or inhibit inclusion. In the paper inclusion is understood as “maximizing the participation of all children” (Allan, 2008:33), and participation is understood as learning in collaboration with others, while students are involved in the academic field and accepted for who they are (Booth, 2011). To create knowledge about students’ participation we use Wenger’s (2004) terms and ask: To what extent do we see "legitimate peripheral participation" that can potentially lead to full participation, and to what extent do we see "marginalized non-participation" that potentially leads to full exclusion from the student community?

Whether students are included in the student community is related to the different strategies they bring into play. This phenomenon can be explained with the concept of social capital (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1996), which is the aggregate of the resources linked to being part of a group. Bourdieu emphasizes that people tend to acknowledge one another and affirm group membership through rituals, and he refers to these activities as investment strategies. Inspired by Bourdieu, we ask: Which "cards" do the students play to become legitimate participants in SYKL. What counts as trump?

Schmidt (2015) shows that students use different strategies to be included, and that these strategies are both academically and socially grounded at the same time. Thus, there is a close connection between acceptance, participation, and performance. In the presentation this is understood as a socio-academic inclusion, which is a lens we use when analyzing the students’ socio-academic investment strategies.

Thus, the driving research questions are:

• What kind of conversational actions characterize the students’ different assisting strategies in SYKL?
• How does different assisting strategies affect the socio-academic inclusion?

The importance of social skills for mental health and social participation has been investigated sufficiently. As teachers are required to foster social skills in daily class but are also confronted with limited time resources, an economical way of fostering social skills implicitly by using specific teaching methods seems to be expedient.

Investigating a form of implicit learning that doesn’t involve the teacher directly in the mechanisms of peer influence seems to be promising. Peer influence has been confirmed repeatedly for antisocial behavior while studies on this effect for social skills or similar constructs is scarce but promising (Busching & Krahé, 2020). Consequently, the question arises if small effects of peer influence concerning social skills might be enhanced by providing students with opportunities to learn from their peers and therefore be influenced by them. Bandura (1971) postulated, that only behavior that it shown explicitly can be adapted and later repeated by learners. A teaching method that requires social skills in terms of communication and cooperation is cooperative learning (Johnson & Johnson, 2002). Cooperative learning evidently fosters academic achievement (Slavin, 1983) and requires social skills (Johnson & Johnson, 2002). Furthermore, it seems to foster prosocial behavior (van Ryzin, 2020). Accordingly, it supports teachers on both teaching goals. Within the SOZIUS project (www.sozius-projekt.de) a specific form of cooperative learning was established that allows to focus on social interactions (Hank, Weber & Huber, 2022). In this way, especially children who are lacking social skills are supposed to get the chance to observe socially successful behavior and ultimately adapt it.

The aim of this study is to investigate whether cooperative learning might enhance social learning opportunities concerning social skills. Therefore, it is hypothesized that social skills increase in classes conducting cooperative learning (Hypothesis 1). Furthermore, especially students with lower social skills are expected to benefit from highly skilled peer contexts in cooperative learning settings (Hypothesis 2).