مرکز منطقه ای اطلاع رساني علوم و فناوري - Students’ Opinions on Implementations of Different Cooperative Learning Methods in Social Studies Course

Abstract :

The aim of this study is to determine the students’ opinions on the implementations of the different cooperative learning methods at the secondary school 6th-grade in the course of social studies. In this study, the focus group interview, which is an important technique of the qualitative data collection, was used. The unit of “Democracy’s Adventure (DA)” in the social studies course was taught to three different class in a secondary school called Sabanci Secondary School in the province of Erzurum by using the jigsaw, group investigation (GI) and reading-writing-presentation (RWP) methods in a 5-weeks period. After the implementations were completed, the focus group interviews were conducted with students who were selected among low, medium and high level students from each class in accordance with the maximum variation sampling. A total of 30 students participated in these interviews, including 10 students from each of the three classes. To determine the opinions of students on the learning process, Focus Group Interview Form consisting of open-ended questions were used. Content analysis was carried out to analyze the qualitative data in the study. As a result of data analysis, the students in three groups generally stated that they learnt the subjects better, acquired some social skills, and there were some positive improvements in their relationships with their friends thanks to cooperative method. However, the students expressed that the desire to getting award could turn into competition among groups in the class; and this situation could affect in particular friendship relations with other groups negatively.