ABSTRACT
The Plowden report (1967) advocated the benefits of children working together collaboratively on tasks, arguing that such experience promoted enquiry and helped to stimulate thinking and communication skills. Evidence from a variety of research projects undertaken in the 1970s suggested however, that:
While children were usually set in groups there were very few cases where children were given the kind of work which required them to collaborate together and to work as a team. (Galton, 1987)
A variety of evidence from psychological research has emphasized the fact that learning is as much a social act as it is a cognitive or individual activity. The studies of Tamburrini (pp. 297-300) and Donaldson (pp. 306-11) remind us of the importance of context in children’s learning. The investigations of Paul Light (1979, 1986) emphasize the importance of the social world of children and the most recent studies emanating from the University of Geneva have demonstrated that children engaging in Piagetian tasks collaboratively make considerable gains in their understanding (Open University Course E3652, Cognitive Development).
The developments which have occurred in problem solving in the primary classroom attempt to take advantage of the social nature of learning and indicates a move from the emphasis on the individual which typified practice in many primary classrooms in the 1960s and 1970s. Keith Jackson (1983), the director of the Bulmershe-Comino Problem-Solving Project, argued that problem solving in the classroom created opportunities for — pupil centred learning; active participation; shared responsibility; the development of confidence, independence, and self-sufficiency; good reciprocal relations between teachers and pupils; and an opportunity for children to reveal their creativity and at the same time develop previously unrevealed talent and potential. The two articles which follow are offered as evidence to support these claims. The first by Fisher provides some of the evidence to justify the inclusion of problem solving activities in the classroom. As Alister Fraser (pp. 373-8) had attempted to do in his Summerhill type meeting, Fisher believes that problem solving attempts to make children partners in the learning process and to give them control over what they are doing. The second extract by Patrick Easen (pp. 393-4) reminds us, however, that many of the problems used as the basis of activity are not the children’s problems. They are often artificial, contrived by the teacher. Real problem solving, he suggests, should be based upon the problems children themselves face.
Real problems for children are those that have an immediate, practical effect on their lives, and in which the children themselves can effect some improvement of the situation. (Easen, 1987)
