Heikkinen, Johanna
(Helsingin yliopisto, 2019)
Recent studies show that motivation, emotion, and interest are engaged in learning. Engagement to learning is a complex entity in which the dynamic interaction between the student and the learning environment is central. In addition, students` ability to influence their own learning, mutual cooperation, and meaningful experience in learning strengthens engagement in learning. Recent curriculum on behalf of transversal competence underlines central meaning of these factors in teaching. This is also topical, as the learning outcomes and motivation of children and young people have fallen in recent years. The purpose of this thesis is to study the factors involved engagement in comprehensive school setting during science learning project on 5.–6. grades.
The data (n = 74) was collected in spring 2018 from a local school in a metropolitan area during the phenom-enal science learning process in classes 5–6, which was carried out according to inquiry-based learning. The Experience Sampling Form was developed for this thesis in order to study the students' internal experiences during the learning process. Students responded to the questionnaire six times during the five-week working pe-riod, and field notes were also used during analysis of the thesis. Experience Sampling data was used to gener-ate sum variables (motivation, academic emotions, and interest factors), the interconnection was examined by the Spearmans` rank correlation coefficient. On the second phase, the link between the variables and the stages of work (inquiry based learning) was examined by the Kruskall Wallis test and the paired Mann-Whitney U test. The connection between variables and working methods (researching team, whole class) were examined with Cross-Tabulation Analysis, also observations from field notes were produced and compared with the work stages (teacher guidance, information retrieval, evaluation).
The formed variables´ correlation is statistically significant to a large extent with each other, so it is justified to investigate these synergies. On the other hand there were no statistically significant differences between work phases and variables, exception was apathy variable, which had statistically significant difference be-tween question making and evaluation. In terms of working habits, students' experiences (somewhat, much) were evenly distributed with activity, insertion and ability variables. Apathy was less experienced and student experienced both ways of working mainly rewarding. Experience of import was less experienced during the en-tire class work and student had less autonomy experience during both working methods. According to findings, interaction and concentration were the most abundant during the work of the research team.
The results of this thesis confirm that learning is not about individual factors, but about the complex process of the student and the learning environment. In addition, the students' ability to actively influence their own work and the students’ mutual work reinforce engagement in learning. In summary, it can also be said that phe-nomenal learning according to inquiry-based learning strengthens students' autonomy, interaction and engage-ment to learning. This is significant, because the current curriculum in particular challenges the implementation of teaching to be more cooperative. However, more information about learning is still needed. The purpose of this thesis could be applied more widely in the field of education research so that the engagement in learning could be explored longer term and in among several classes.