This thesis reports case studies of students working with context rich problems (CRP)
and mini projects (MP) in physics in an upper secondary school class and in a physics
teacher education class at university. The students report a big shift from physics in
secondary school as fun and easy, to physics in upper secondary school as boring,
difficult and with lack of time for reflections and physics talking, but they also found
physics as interesting in itself. In order to study how group discussions in physics
influence the students learning and to study the phenomena of students’ ownership of
learning (SOL) we introduced CRP and MP. We video recorded five groups with 14
teacher students at university in the end of 2002, and five group with 15 students at
upper secondary school during the beginning of their second physics course in the
spring term in 2003. MP and CRP in physics were used as instructional settings in
order to give students possibility to strengthen their holistic understanding and their
possibilities to ownership. When students get the opportunity to manage their own
learning and studying by open-ended tasks in physics, without the teacher determining
all details of the performance, this gives more ownership of learning. The advantage
of MPs and CRPs from the student’s point of view is more freedom to act, think and
discuss and from the teacher’s view, to get insights of the students’ ability and how
they really think in physics. The ownership is found to be crucial for motivation and
development of competence