Elevernas tolkning av skoluppgiften : en beskrivning av elevers förhållningssätt till lärares frågor

Sammanfattning: The chief aim is to describe school tasks from the pupils’ point of view. Descriptions are made of pupils’ activities related to the task given by the teacher. Ten pupils are described. A discussion of the concept of activity as used in cognitive psychology forms the theoretical basis for the study. Activity is described as a mode of thinking about phenomena and it is assumed to have an assimilative and an accommodative aspect. Observations are made with tape recorder and field notes. The teachers and a number of pupils are interviewed. The pupils have two types of goals for their activities; procedure related goals, i.e. how to do things, and subject-related goals, i.e. what they are supposed to do. The pupils’ difficulties in dealing with subject-related goals are discussed in terms of their in-going frames of reference or alternate frameworks. These frames of reference influence the pupils’ interpretation of the learning task in various ways. Not only can they make it difficult to interpret a phenomenon, but they can also make the whole of a question incomprehensible, uninteresting and pointless. Finally, the pupils engaged in subject related goals are discussed in terms of what kind of strategies they use in working towards their goals. Three types of strategies are delineated and analysed: an assimilative, an accommodative, and an active strategy, it is usual to emphasize the importance of assimilative processes in learning situations. Here it is maintained that for learning to occur in a specific situation initiated by the teacher, a balance between assimilative and accommodative processes is necessary.