The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of the methods of group reward and group construction in cooperative learning on the academic achievement of mathematics in elementary school. The specific research problems of interest in this...
The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of the methods of group reward and group construction in cooperative learning on the academic achievement of mathematics in elementary school. The specific research problems of interest in this study were as follows:
First, is there any difference between the methods of group reward on the academic achievement of mathematics?
Second, is there any difference between the methods of group construction on the academic achievement of mathematics?
Third, is there any interaction effect between the methods of group reward and group construction on the academic achievement of mathematics?
The main hypotheses tested were as follows:
(1) There would be a significant difference between the methods of group reward on the academic achievement of mathematics.
(2) There would be a significant difference between the methods of group construction on the academic achievement of mathematics.
(3) There would be no significant interaction effect between the methods of group reward and group construction on the academic achievement of mathematics.
The subjects in this study were 48 second-grade elementary school students. They were assigned to one of the four experimental groups. Each group was composed of 12 students. The STAD cooperative learning technique was applied to test the effects of treatment. The experimental instruments of used in this study were the prior scores of mathematics achievement test to verify group homogeneity, achievement test to identify the treatment effects. The dependent variable was the academic achievement scores on the immediate posttest. The experimental design of this study was 2(methods of group reward: group competition, group non-competition) X 2(methods of group construction: homogeneous group, hetrogeneous group) factorial design. Based on the scores obtained, ANOVA and other statistical analyses were performed by SPSS WIN 9.0.
The main findings obtained from the results and discussion of this study were as follows:
(1) There was a significant difference between the methods of group reward on the academic achievement of mathematics. Namely, Group competition reward group performed significantly better than group non-competition group on the academic achievement scores.
(2) There was a significant difference between the methods of group construction on the academic achievement of mathematics. Namely, homogeneous group performed significantly better than hetrogeneous group on the academic achievement scores.
(3) There was no significant interaction effect between the methods of group reward and group construction on the academic achievement of mathematics.
Consequently, while research hypothesis 3 was not rejected, hypotheses 1, 2 were accepted.