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INTRODUCTION
BACKGROUND
Effects on Social Skills. There has been a growing realization that schools
should not just educate students to become good pupils in a given academic
area but also should socialize them to become good future citizens. Many
different approaches have been suggested to achieve the desired state of
citizenship education that promotes being an educated citizen and productive
member of society. CLS are distinguished from other teaching strategies in
COOPERATIVE LEARNING STRATEGIES IN KUWAIT 297
Teacher-Centered Strategies
Teacher-centered strategies represent the traditional method of teaching
used in most schools for many years. Traditional approaches assume that
the main source of the information in a classroom is the teacher; therefore,
students should deal mainly with the teacher to acquire knowledge.
Learning involves a passive reception of information from the teacher by
the students who then organize and store these ideas without substantive
modification in long-term memory, to be retrieved when needed. The
teacher needs to partition and sequence the information so it is presented
in a logical manner in order to facilitate and reinforce the students’ rote
memorization and storage of ideas.
In a traditional teacher-centered approach, the dominance of the teacher
takes center stage. The students rely on their teachers to decide what,
when, and how to learn. The majority of teacher learning work involves
listening to a teacher talk, using either a lecture technique or a Socratic
method (simple question and answer) which demands basic recall of
knowledge from the learners. Lecture-based instruction dominates class-
room activities, with the teacher delivering well over 80% of the talk in
most classrooms (Effandi & Zanaton, 2007).
Martin, Mullis, Gonzalez & Chrostowski (2004) found that in science
classrooms, 25% of the time is spent in a lecture, 19% in practice, 13% on
homework review, and 11% on students’ individual problem solving.
This means that in traditional classrooms, students discuss and interact
with their teachers in a question–response–evaluation pattern to gain
knowledge rather than with each other in discussions and negotiations.
Sharan (1996) described such classrooms as follows:
In traditional arrangements, each student worked at his or her own pace and was expected
to be left alone by other students. It was sometimes possible for children to self-select
appropriate material and pace themselves to complete a work assignment. With this
approach the individual took on the responsibility for completing the task, sometimes
evaluating progress and the quality of the effort. (p. 11)
COOPERATIVE LEARNING STRATEGIES IN KUWAIT 299
TABLE 1
Summary comparison of cooperative learning and teacher-centered approaches
METHOD
Participants
The researcher asked the Ministry of Education to randomly propose two
representative schools having multiple classes at each grade level, with a
common teacher for science. Each identified school randomly assigned
four different classrooms with two common science teachers for the
purpose of this study. The resulting effects were two public elementary
schools with four classroom teachers teaching two classes in the same
science unit (earth, soil, and agriculture) to female students. Teachers
were asked to utilize both teaching strategies; one randomly selected class
received teacher-centered instruction and the other class received
cooperative learning instruction.
The eight intact single-gender grade 5 science classes from two
separate elementary schools consisted of 163 female students. The
students were between the ages of 9 and 11. The number of students in
each classroom was on average 21. It is important to remember that the
aim of this study was not to compare achievement on the basis of gender
but rather to test the effectiveness of a relatively new method of teaching
in the elementary schools in Kuwait.
Instructional Procedure
The researcher gave an orientation to the four teachers involved. None of
the teachers had previously utilized cooperative strategies, but all believed
they were proficient with the TCS. The main purpose of the orientation
was to plan and discuss the best ways of using CLS in teaching the earth,
soil, and agriculture unit. The orientation session included discussions on
how the teachers could motivate and encourage students to ask more
questions, depend on themselves during the learning process, and
encourage student involvement in essential scientific experiences:
observations, measurements, experimentation, interpretation of data, and
predictions. This orientation helped the teachers to understand the nature
of CLS through the activities of the students; it also assisted them in
designing and conducting cooperative learning-centered lessons applica-
ble to students’ varying intellectual levels. The researcher used a video
tape of a cooperative learning setting in the USA to illustrate classroom
practices, which the Kuwaiti teachers found extremely useful.
COOPERATIVE LEARNING STRATEGIES IN KUWAIT 303
The science unit took 6 weeks to teach. The science classes met
3 days per week for 45-min lessons. Each science teacher taught one
teacher-centered group and one cooperative learning group, emphasiz-
ing the specified teaching and learning attributes characteristic of the
specific approach (Table 1) for 6 weeks to ensure each class received
consistent and equal time for instruction. Furthermore, in the begin-
ning, the researcher attended all science classes to observe students’
behavior and teachers’ teaching methods to ensure avoidance of
teacher bias and the appropriate and consistent use of the two
prescribed methods. He continued to attend science classes until he
felt confident that the teachers were following instructions and research
procedures. In the traditional or TCS setting, students remained in
rows, especially when taking notes or reviewing homework assign-
ments. When the experimental groups met in the regular science
classroom, students were organized in CLS groups of four to five
students. Students in both settings were taught the same material in the
academic unit and the same science concepts or skills.
Validity
The social skills survey consisted of 12 yes/no items, derived from the
literature to fulfill the rationale and rigorous development procedure
304 ALI EBRAHIM
reflect the content learning outcomes of the earth, soil, and agriculture
unit. Next, the researcher examined the validity and reliability of the two
instruments. The social skills survey was reviewed by three professors at
Kuwait University to establish face and construct validity. They
suggested minor modifications to some items, and revisions were
performed accordingly.
Then, six fifth grade students not in the sample of this study were
selected to go over the test questions and survey items. The researcher
posed the following questions to them:
Did you have any difficulty answering this survey and test?
Did you understand what you should do in both the survey and the
test?
Did you understand all the statements of the survey and questions of
the test?
Which statements or questions were not clear to you?
All six students gave the researcher their responses, indicating that they
were able to clearly read the instrument questions and statements. Also,
they pointed out that the instructions for the test questions and the survey
items were clear and understandable.
Reliability
Reliability is an indication of the consistency of an instrument. A test is
considered reliable when the same results occur regardless of when the
test occurs or who does the scoring (Charles, 1995). Before conducting
this study, the researcher did a pilot study by distributing the two
instruments among 60 female students in a fifth grade science class in
Kuwait. None of these students were involved in the instructional
groups and they were selected randomly from other available fifth
grade classes.
The students were selected based on their completion of the target
science unit for this study. The science achievement test and social
skills survey were administered to the 60 students. The reliability of
these instruments was explored based on their responses using a
Cronbach’s alpha procedure for determining internal consistency. The
results for the achievement test revealed an acceptable coefficient of
internal consistency (α = 0.87). The exploration of the reliability of
the social skills survey revealed an acceptable reliability coefficient
of α = 0.73). Hence, both the achievement test and social skills
survey can be considered sufficiently valid and reliable instruments to
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DATA ANALYSIS
The effects of the two teaching methods (CLS and TCS) on students’
science achievement and use of social skills were explored with separate
one-way analysis of covariance (ANCOVA). Students’ posttest scores on
the achievement tests and responses to the social skills survey were used
as the dependent variables, teaching approaches were used as the
independent variable, and pretest scores were used as the covariant.
TABLE 2
Descriptive statistics (sample sizes, means, and standard deviations) of the CLS and TCS
groups’ science achievement
Pretest Posttest
Teaching method N M SD N M SD
TABLE 3
Result of the ANCOVA for the difference between the control and the experimental
groups’ posttest for science achievement
The relative impact of CLS and TCS on student achievement revealed that the
cooperative learning approach has more positive effects on student achieve-
ment than the teacher-centered approach. This result is consistent with the
results of previous studies of Johnson & Johnson (1990) who reported that
TABLE 4
Descriptive statistics (sample sizes, means, and standard deviations) of the CLS and TCS
groups’ for use of social skills
Pretest Posttest
Teaching method N M SD N M SD
TABLE 5
Result of the ANCOVA for the difference between the control and the experimental
groups’ posttest for use of social skills
over 323 studies have been conducted over the past 90 years comparing the
effects of cooperative, competitive, and teacher-centered learning situations on
students’ achievement. The fundamental findings of these studies indicated
that students’ productivity in cooperative learning settings is higher than in
teacher-centered situations.
This finding suggests that learning is more effective when students are
actively involved in sharing ideas and working cooperatively with other
students to complete academic tasks. Cooperative learning experiences
appear to promote higher achievement than more passive teacher-centered
experiences, at least for female students in elementary schools, and for
science, as indicated in the current study.
It may be that young females in cooperative learning settings have a more
positive role in the learning process than they have in teacher-centered
settings. Therefore, when students participate actively in productive learning
processes, they are able to negotiate shared meaning and construct meaningful
understanding, which is not always possible in a teacher-directed approach.
CLS place more emphasis on the students and their learning than on teacher
and teaching performance. The problem-solving methods and working in
small groups appear to promote a sense of individual responsibility and a love
of challenge in the student, thereby increasing motivation for learning. If
students are highly motivated to learn, their level of achievement will also be
high. Nor Azizah & Chong Poh (2000) suggested that cooperative learning
can inculcate values such as independence and love. This is what appears to
have happened in these cooperative learning groups.
Furthermore, cooperative learning experiences, unlike teacher-centered
experiences, are more similar to experiences of everyday life. Daily life
experienced by students outside the school, whether with their families or
friends, is based on cooperation and mutual relations between individuals and
helps them in their attitude development. Johnson et al. (1993) proposed
COOPERATIVE LEARNING STRATEGIES IN KUWAIT 309
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Q1. Tick ( ) in front of the correct sentence and ( X ) in front of the incorrect sentence:
1. From the (vinegar + limestone) experiment, limestone is affected by acidic rain. Why do we
build the houses in Kuwait from limestone? The correct answer is:
2. The phenomena that is formed as a result of the effect of wind which carries sand and soil
and hits:
3. Soa'ad took a sample from the soil in her garden. She added some water to it and she left it
to settle. After a while, the sample should look like which one of the following?:
COOPERATIVE LEARNING STRATEGIES IN KUWAIT 311
Q3. Write the correct scientific term for each of the following sentences:
1. Medium at which plants grow, fix their roots, and get water. __________
2. The movement of desert sand over planted areas which leads to the burying of
plants and roads and causes traffic jams. __________
3. Parts of earth that are higher than the sea’s surface. __________
1. Write the name of the method that is used to water the plants in
this picture. The plant is watered by____________________
2. You have three types of soil in front of you. The soil that
is best for planting is __________. Explain your answer
depending on the figures.
Salwa went shopping. She entered a shop with wooden shelves that had wool, cotton,
and silk clothes on them. Salwa bought what she needed then she went home and ate a
meal that had vegetables which give her body fibers that she needs to grow.
1. _______________________
2. _______________________
1.________________________
2.________________________
Q9. Match column (A) with column (B) by putting the correct number in front of the correct
term:
A B
APPENDIX 2
Yes No
I was able to help my friends who needed help during ☺ ☹
the science class.
I was able to work with my friends together to answer ☺ ☹
questions or to solve problems.
I learned how to choose freely the best choice to solve a problem. ☺ ☹
In science class, I could discuss science with my friends. ☺ ☹
In science class, I usually cared about my friends’ understanding. ☺ ☹
I learned in science class how to make friendships. ☺ ☹
I learned in science class how to work with others ☺ ☹
to solve problems or answer questions.
I did not like to work in groups because my friends in ☺ ☹
the group were slow to catch on.
I did not like to work in groups because my friends in the ☺ ☹
group were impatient with me.
I did not like to work in groups because my friends in the ☺ ☹
group were playing while I was working on answering questions.
I did not like to work in groups because it took too much ☺ ☹
time from me to teach my friends the correct answers.
I did not like to work in groups because my friends in ☺ ☹
the group would not allow me to talk when I had
a different way to solve a problem.
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314 ALI EBRAHIM
Kuwait University
Kuwait, Kuwait
E-mail: aliebrahim@hotmail.com