The Upshots of Mathematical Knowledge and Skills Achieved in Friendship Groups through Cooperative Learning Paradigm
Date
2009
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Faculty of Education
Abstract
The cooperative learning paradigm has been figure out as an umbrella method of
all other methods. It has itself many methods but each and every one has been found to be
dedicated to make the learning creative, joyful, socialized, team working and meaningful
based on the potentiality of prior knowledge of the students as their cultural capital. As the
method runs through social activity and teamwork, it seeks the true and direct
participation of the learners with their own head and soul. It has mainly been spinning on
the three theories; psychology of building knowledge through mental exercise/action of
Piaget, Lave and Vygotsky’s anthropological perspective of learning through scaffolding
and Dewey’s philosophy of truth is subjective.
In this closure, the study was undertaken with the purpose of digging out the
effectiveness of cooperative learning approach through the ‘friendship group’ formation in
terms of immediate learning, withholding and ultimately the net gain in learning. In the
mean time, it was tried to find out the problems being faced by the teachers while
adopting cooperative learning system, self-regulation of the students and relevancy of this
approach in Nepalese classroom situation. To ease my study, I had further formulated the
principal research questions into other components as well. The basic framework of the
theoretical closure was made to lay on the foundation of epistemology, ontology and
axiology of the cooperative learning paradigm. In this study, the review of literature has
covered the general overview of different types of related literatures to frame up the study
with specific ingredients and some theoretical closures that to link the issues raised
herewith.
As I was basically concerned with the perception, participation and output of the
learning of the students based on their cultural and social property, I adopted the
qualitative research method along with the quantitative one. The research method used
was non-equivalent control group of quasi-experimental design. The study was done by
taking sample of size 74 students comprised of control and experimental groups from two
schools of Kathmandu valley. The major tools of qualitative method were observation of
classrooms with checklist and interview of students, subject teachers, general teachers,
head teachers, subject experts, supervisors and curriculum experts with interview
guidelines. Similarly, the pretest, posttest and retention test were administered to collect
the data for quantitative analysis. The quantitative data were analyzed with the help of 13.0 version of SPSS package whereas the qualitative data were properly arranged and
triangulated with the theoretical closures and previous findings and then gave the final
meaning to my findings. The major findings were the significant achievements of the
students of experimental group, who were taught according to the cooperative learning
phenomena with the help of cooperative teaching incidents through friendship groups. The
achievements were taken into account of immediate learning, last longer memory, net gain
and three cognitive domains. Similarly, the study has shown the self-esteemness of the
students and relevancy of cooperative learning method with some modifications in
Nepalese classroom set-ups. In this study, I also realized that the importance of learning
environment which includes classroom set up, friendship groups, cultural and social
capital, valuing and relating the pre-existed knowledge of students to achieve the
mathematical knowledge and skills.
Description
Keywords
knowledge, Cooperative