Cooperative Learning Case Study

In the article a Case study of Cooperative learning and communication pedagogy: Does working in teams make a difference had some important points. Tasy, and Brady (2010) explained Cooperative learning as one of the most commonly used forms of active pedagogy.

They also stated that cooperative learning is based on the idea that students lean thorough social contexts (Adams and Hamm, 1994). In this case study the research is based on active learning through examining the relationship between student’s involvement in cooperative learning and academic achievement with undergraduates. There were some important background points in cooperative learning. One point that Tasy, and Brady (2010) made was that cooperative learning is a valuable tool

There are 24 undergraduate students that re conducting this research. The objective of this course was to introduce the students to social science research methods. The research begun at the start of the semester and the instructor groups the students in four to six people for the purpose of this research and this group remained consistent throughout the semester. When the students started they were assigned a number code and that was grouped that they would be working with. Each student individually completed a set of questions and these questions evaluated each group member performance in the group exercises. The independent variable in this study was the involvement of cooperative learning. Over the course of four months students were given a variety of research exercises related to their project and the task were: purpose research questions, design a methodology to answer questions, collect and analyze data, and discuss findings. Johnson (1991), suggested that in the process of cooperative leaning is has seven components. These components are group processing, motivation, competition, dependability, accountability, interactivity and the use of collaborative skills. Group processing was measured by the student’s ability to provide constructive feedback with the other group members. Motivation was measured by the student’s desire to take part in the activity. Competition is measured by how much the

It was done well because of how Tsay and Brady include their compotes that they used to assess cooperative learning. For example, using the seven measures. The measures that were used were group processing, motivation, competition, dependability, accountability, interactivity and the use of collaborative skills. I felt these measures really explain what cooperative learning skills that are needed to be successful. The only thing that I thought that was done poorly was the conclusion. I thought that Tsay Brady could have gone more in depth on how they measured what worked and why it did not work. I think I would have had a better understanding of what to pay more attention too. I do trust the finding that they have because they used RAT to score their data. The RAT are closed book quizzes and the students worked in their cooperative learning groups to compete the task. The final grade was calculated by individual RAT and group RAT. I did find that the method and results supported the theoretical claims of the author. The results support this because Tsay and Brady were exploring the relationship between cooperative learning and academic performance. The research showed that cooperative leaning has increased academic performance with students. The way this study could be improved by having more of an explanation of why some of the measures did not work in a cooperative learning setting and how we could fix those