Our society requires an ability for us to interact and cooperate with the people in our surroundings. This applies to both grown-ups as well as young people. In school, the teachers have a responsibility to prepare pupils for the society and using cooperative learning could be one way to do this. The syllabus for the subject of Swedish invites for teachers to work with cooperative learning by formulating that the pupils should be given the opportunities to write and process texts individually and together with others, this does not appear in the syllabus for the subject of history. Hence our interest in examining cooperative learning in both subjects.

The aim of this study is to examine whether cooperative teaching can foster pupils' knowledge development in the subjects’ history and Swedish for grades 4 - 6. The study will analyze the differences between teaching through traditional teaching methods and cooperative learning. To fulfill this aim the following questions were formulated:

How does pupils' understanding of concepts in history differ after cooperative learning compared to after traditional teaching?How does pupils’ descriptive writing in Swedish differ after cooperative learning compared to after traditional teaching?The study is an intervention where pupils received teaching through traditional teaching as well as through teaching using cooperative learning. After each lesson, the pupils did a test and to enable the analysis these were collected to examine the differences. The results show, in accordance with previous research, that cooperative teaching did develop the pupils’ results in both subjects.