Informellt elevinflytande på högstadiet: Ökar inflytandet om högstadieeleven undervisas av lärare som arbetar på både högstadiet och mellanstadiet

Sammanfattning: Background: The curriculum of 1994 and the school law prescribe that the pupils have a right to exert an influence upon their education. According to the curriculum and the school law, this influence shall be enhanced with increasing age and maturity. In reality the circumstances are quite the contrary, which means that the pupil’s informal influence is actually decreasing simultaneous with increasing age. An explanation of this negative development could be found in a range of frame factors. Purpose: In regard to the frame factors for informal pupil influence, it was relevant to investigate whether there was a discrepancy between pupils' interpretation of experienced influence, depending on their teacher - if the teacher were teaching only at last stage, or both at middle and last stages of elementary school. Pupils at last stage, who were taught by a teacher working at both stages, were predicted to interpret more experienced influence upon their education. The prediction was particularly directed to pupils, which were taught by the same teacher now at last stage, as they were already at middle stage. Method: The study was based on a quantitative research with 257 pupil questionnaires and 8 teacher questionnaires, which were analysed with Kruskal-Wallis test and chi-square test in SPSS. The alpha level was determined to p<0,05. The teachers constituted two groups: (1) teachers who only worked at last stage of elementary school, (2) teachers who worked both at middle and last stages of elementary school. The pupils were split into three groups: the MM-group - pupils at last stage, which were taught by the same teacher as they were at middle stage, the MH-group - pupils at last stage, who were taught by the same teacher as previous group, but hadn't met this teacher before last stage, and the HH-group - pupils at last stage, who were taught only by teachers solely working at last stage of elementary school. Results: There were significant differences between the pupil groups concerning their interpreted experience of influence on school-books, contents and way of working (p<0,001), where the MM-group gave the highest frequency and the HH-group the lowest. This relationship did also appear at a significant level in other considered aspects of informal pupil influence, e.g. in regard to interest of exert an influence upon their own education and how the influence had developed since middle stage. Keywords: Informal pupil influence, leadership theories, the frame factor theory, Dewey, the training of teacher's reform, 4-9-teachers.