Children’s Perspectives Toward Ability-Based Group Work in a Primary Classroom

ABSTRACT

This article reports the findings from a study that explored children’s interactions and their perceptions of working in groups in a primary classroom. Group work among children has been researched widely to highlight its efficacy in influencing children’s cognitive and social learning in mainstream classrooms. Such research, however, appears to ignore children’s own perspectives, and thus may contribute only slightly to presenting a true picture of children’s thinking and their experiences of working with others during their routinely organized group work. This small-scale study was conducted with twenty-seven 9- to 10-year-old children studying in Year Five. Using ethnographic research design, unstructured participant observations were used to study children’s interactions, and informal conversational interviews were held with children to listen to their perspectives. The data gathered through observations and interviews were analyzed qualitatively. This article reports findings from the interview data and provides insight on what children think of group work, how children experience group work, and how children want to see group work in the future. With these findings, the article highlights the importance of listening to children’s perspectives by practitioners, researchers, and policymakers when organizing group work in the mainstream classrooms.

KEYWORDS:

• Children’s agency
• children’s perceptions
• classroom context
• ethnographic research
• group work

Acknowledgments

I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of my supervisors for their invaluable feedback that has significantly improved the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.