Reinforcing students’ mathematical skills through cooperative learning strategy

Abstract

Cooperative learning is an educational approach which aims to organize classroom activities into academic and social learning experiences (Gillies, 2016). There is much more to cooperative learning than merely arranging students into groups, and it has been described as "structuring positive interdependence. Students must work in groups to complete tasks collectively toward academic goals. Unlike individual learning, which can be competitive in nature, students learning cooperatively can capitalize on one another's resources and skills, asking one another for information, evaluating one another's ideas, and monitoring one another's work, (Chiu, 2008). This study aims to find out how cooperative learning through structured and unstructured grouping schemes compare in terms of their effectiveness in reinforcing students’ Mathematics achievement and the difficulties encountered by the students in both structured and unstructured groups. The one-shot quasi-experimental research design specifically the pre-posttest design was employed in the study. Participants of this study were the first year students of the College of Teacher Education of Cagayan State University. Descriptive and inferential statistics like frequency count, percentage, mean and t-test for dependent and independent samples were used to interpret the data. The integration of cooperative learning strategy, either structured or unstructured grouping schemes reinforce the performance of students in Mathematics. However, cooperative learning has far better results when unstructured grouping scheme is employed among students. Since the students find difficulty on simplifying expressions with rational exponents to radicals, composition of functions, solving linear and quadratic equations and solving word problems on linear and quadratic equations; intervention measures such as modular approach in teaching, simulation activities and remedial teaching were suggested to address such difficulties and to enhance the performance of the students in Mathematics particularly in College Algebra.