Jigsaw is a cooperative learning st

Jigsaw is a cooperative learning structure applicable to team assignments that call for expertise in several distinct areas. For example, in a laboratory exercise, areas of expertise might include experimental design, equipment calibration and operation, data analysis (including statistical error analysis), and interpretation of results in light of theory, and in a design project the areas might be conceptual design, process instrumentation and control, safety and environmental impact evaluation, and cost and profitability analysis.

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Suppose four such areas are identified for a project. The students are formed into teams of four, and either the instructor or the team members designate which member will be responsible for each area. Then all the experts in each area are given specialized training, which may involve getting handouts or presentations by the course instructor, a faculty colleague, or a graduate student knowledgeable in the area in question. The students then return to their home teams and complete the assignment. The teams count on each member to provide his or her expertise, and if an expert does a poor job, the quality of the final project is compromised and everyone’s grade suffers. Moreover, if the students are tested on all of the areas of expertise, the overall learning from the assignment improves dramatically. The tests require all students to understand the entire project, and not just the part that they were the experts in (individual accountability), and the experts have the responsibility of transmitting their expertise to their teammates (positive interdependence).

Peer Editing

When teams turn in written lab reports and/or give oral presentations, the usual procedure is for the instructor to do the critiquing and grading. A powerful alternative is peer editing, in which pairs of groups do the critiquing for each other’s first drafts (written) or run-throughs (oral). The groups then revise their reports and presentations taking into account the critiquing teams’ suggestions and then submit or present to the instructor. This activity lightens the grading load for instructors, who end up with much better products to grade than they would have without the first round of critiquing.

If a grading checklist or rubric is to be used for grading the team reports (which is always a good idea), it should be shared with the students before the reports are written and used for the peer editing. This practice helps the students understand what the instructor is looking for and invariably results in the preparation of better reports, and it also helps assure that the peer critiques are as consistent and useful as possible. If several rounds of peer editing are done and the instructor collects and grades the checklists or rubrics for the first one or two rounds, the students will end up giving much the same rubric scores as the instructor gives, and in good classes the instructor may only have to do spot checks of peer grades instead of having to provide detailed feedback on every report.

Peer-Led Team Learning

In peer- led team learning (PLTL), lectures are supplemented by weekly 2-hour workshops in which students work in six- to eight-person groups to solve structured problems under the guidance of trained peer leaders. The problems must be challenging and directly related to the course tests and other assessment measures. The course professor creates problems and instructional materials, assists with the training and supervision of peer leaders, and reviews progress of the workshops. The materials prompt students to consider ideas, confront misconceptions, and apply what they know to the solution process. The peer leaders clarify goals, facilitate engagement of the students with the materials and one another, and provide encouragement, but do not lecture or provide answers and solutions (8, 9).

PLTL was developed by chemistry educators in the 1990s and may be the most prominent group-learning strategy in chemistry education. (We will later describe illustrative implementations of the approach.) It is not a cooperative learning strategy by definition, but as Tien et al. (10) point out, it shares a number of elements with CL. The students are confronted with difficult problems and must rely primarily on one another to develop solutions, which promotes positive interdependence, and face-to-face interaction is crucial to the workshop format. Students are tested individually on the knowledge required to solve the problems, and a function of the peer leader is to get team members to explain their understanding to their teammates, both of which provide individual accountability. There is no formal instruction in teamwork skills in PLTL, but informal instruction invariably occurs as the peer leaders facilitate the group interactions. The only CL criterion that does not appear to be addressed as part of the



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PLTL model is regular self-assessment of team functioning, and it would be trivial to add that in PLTL implementations.

Applications in Chemistry Education

The literature of applications of cooperative learning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics is quite large, and a comprehensive review of it is well beyond the scope of this chapter. We will confine ourselves here to describing several examples of applications in chemistry courses.

A bibliography assembled by Nurrenbern and Robinson (11) cites references to roughly 30 studies of team-based learning in chemistry lecture and laboratory courses, and a search for articles in recent issues of the Journal of Chemical Education that included cooperative learning among the key words revealed 47 articles published in 2004, 2005, and the first half of 2006. In the remainder of this section we describe several of these studies.

Hinde and Kovac (12) discuss two courses that introduced team- based learning in different ways. In the second semester of a physical chemistry course for chemistry and chemical engineering majors, biweekly computer-based group work sessions supplemented traditional lectures, and in the the second semester of a biophysical chemistry course taken primarily by biochemistry majors, an approach based on group work with occasional supplementary mini-lectures was used. The group sessions in both courses were inquiry-based. The self -selected teams of three or four in the biophysical chemistry course were given guidelines on effective teamwork, and both peer ratings and self-ratings of student performance on teams contributed to the final course grades. In the physical chemistry course there was little difference in performance between the class in question and previous classes that had been taught without group work, but this result is not surprising in view of the fact that the group activities were infrequent and most of the defining criteria for cooperative learning were not met. In the biophysical chemistry course the instructor’s assessment was that the students gained considerable conceptual understanding and problem-solving ability as well as critical thinking and teamwork sklls, but no comparison with a control group was carried out that would elevate the assessment of the course beyond the anecdotal level. The author concludes that the course would have been improved by providing more structure and feedback, maintaining a better balance between individual and group work, and doing more to promote individual accountability (e.g., give more individual tests) and positive interdependence (e.g., establish and rotate assigned roles within teams).

A better example of cooperative learning implementation and assessment is provided by Tien et al. (10), who conducted peer-led team learning in a first-semester organic chemistry course over a three-year period and compared the performance of the students with the that of students who had taken a traditional version of the course in the preceding three years. The course instructor, text, examination structure, and grading system were the same for both the treatment and comparison groups. While instruction in teamwork skills is not necessarily a component of PLTL, in this case the peer leaders were trained in group dynamics and group skills and used their training to help the student teams learn to function effectively. It is therefore fair to say that the PLTL implementation described in this study fully qualifies as cooperative learning. On average, the workshop students significantly outscored their traditionally-taught counterparts on individual course exams, final course grades, retention in the course, and percentage earning the minimum acceptable grade of C– for moving on to the second semester organic chemistry course. Similar results were obtained specifically for female students and underrepresented minority students. The treatment group found the workshops and workshop problems their most important aids to learning in the course. Similar findings have been reported for PLTL programs in an organic chemistry class at another institution (13) and in a biology course (14), as well as for a cooperative learning implementation in organic chemistry (15).

Results (Vietnamese) 1:

Jigsaw is a cooperative learning structure applicable to team assignments that call for expertise in several distinct areas. For example, in a laboratory exercise, areas of expertise might include experimental design, equipment calibration and operation, data analysis (including statistical error analysis), and interpretation of results in light of theory, and in a design project the areas might be conceptual design, process instrumentation and control, safety and environmental impact evaluation, and cost and profitability analysis.3 Suppose four such areas are identified for a project. The students are formed into teams of four, and either the instructor or the team members designate which member will be responsible for each area. Then all the experts in each area are given specialized training, which may involve getting handouts or presentations by the course instructor, a faculty colleague, or a graduate student knowledgeable in the area in question. The students then return to their home teams and complete the assignment. The teams count on each member to provide his or her expertise, and if an expert does a poor job, the quality of the final project is compromised and everyone’s grade suffers. Moreover, if the students are tested on all of the areas of expertise, the overall learning from the assignment improves dramatically. The tests require all students to understand the entire project, and not just the part that they were the experts in (individual accountability), and the experts have the responsibility of transmitting their expertise to their teammates (positive interdependence).Peer EditingWhen teams turn in written lab reports and/or give oral presentations, the usual procedure is for the instructor to do the critiquing and grading. A powerful alternative is peer editing, in which pairs of groups do the critiquing for each other’s first drafts (written) or run-throughs (oral). The groups then revise their reports and presentations taking into account the critiquing teams’ suggestions and then submit or present to the instructor. This activity lightens the grading load for instructors, who end up with much better products to grade than they would have without the first round of critiquing.If a grading checklist or rubric is to be used for grading the team reports (which is always a good idea), it should be shared with the students before the reports are written and used for the peer editing. This practice helps the students understand what the instructor is looking for and invariably results in the preparation of better reports, and it also helps assure that the peer critiques are as consistent and useful as possible. If several rounds of peer editing are done and the instructor collects and grades the checklists or rubrics for the first one or two rounds, the students will end up giving much the same rubric scores as the instructor gives, and in good classes the instructor may only have to do spot checks of peer grades instead of having to provide detailed feedback on every report.Peer-Led Team LearningIn peer- led team learning (PLTL), lectures are supplemented by weekly 2-hour workshops in which students work in six- to eight-person groups to solve structured problems under the guidance of trained peer leaders. The problems must be challenging and directly related to the course tests and other assessment measures. The course professor creates problems and instructional materials, assists with the training and supervision of peer leaders, and reviews progress of the workshops. The materials prompt students to consider ideas, confront misconceptions, and apply what they know to the solution process. The peer leaders clarify goals, facilitate engagement of the students with the materials and one another, and provide encouragement, but do not lecture or provide answers and solutions (8, 9).PLTL đã được phát triển bởi hóa giáo dục trong những năm 1990 và có thể là chiến lược nhóm học tập nổi bật nhất trong hóa học giáo dục. (Chúng tôi sau đó sẽ mô tả việc triển khai minh họa của các phương pháp.) Nó không phải là một hợp tác học tập chiến lược theo định nghĩa, nhưng khi tiến et al. (10) chỉ ra, nó chia sẻ một số yếu tố với CL. Các sinh viên đang phải đối mặt với những vấn đề khó khăn và phải dựa chủ yếu vào nhau để phát triển các giải pháp, đó khuyến khích phụ thuộc lẫn nhau tích cực, và mặt đối mặt tương tác là rất quan trọng để định dạng hội thảo. Học sinh được kiểm tra cá nhân trên những kiến thức cần thiết để giải quyết các vấn đề, và một chức năng của các nhà lãnh đạo ngang nhau là để có được thành viên trong nhóm để giải thích sự hiểu biết của họ để đồng đội của họ, cả hai đều cung cấp trách nhiệm cá nhân. Không có hướng dẫn chính thức trong kỹ năng làm việc theo nhóm trong PLTL, nhưng không chính thức hướng dẫn không thay đổi xảy ra khi các nhà lãnh đạo ngang nhau tạo điều kiện cho sự tương tác của nhóm. Các tiêu chí CL chỉ dường như không được giải quyết như là một phần của các 4 PLTL mô hình là thường xuyên tự đánh giá của nhóm hoạt động, và nó sẽ là tầm thường để thêm rằng trong việc triển khai PLTL.Ứng dụng trong hóa học giáo dụcCác tài liệu của các ứng dụng học tập hợp tác khoa học, công nghệ, kỹ thuật, và toán học là khá lớn, và một đánh giá toàn diện của nó là cũng vượt ra ngoài phạm vi của chương này. Chúng tôi sẽ nhốt chúng ta ở đây để mô tả một vài ví dụ của các ứng dụng trong hóa học các khóa học.A bibliography assembled by Nurrenbern and Robinson (11) cites references to roughly 30 studies of team-based learning in chemistry lecture and laboratory courses, and a search for articles in recent issues of the Journal of Chemical Education that included cooperative learning among the key words revealed 47 articles published in 2004, 2005, and the first half of 2006. In the remainder of this section we describe several of these studies.Hinde and Kovac (12) discuss two courses that introduced team- based learning in different ways. In the second semester of a physical chemistry course for chemistry and chemical engineering majors, biweekly computer-based group work sessions supplemented traditional lectures, and in the the second semester of a biophysical chemistry course taken primarily by biochemistry majors, an approach based on group work with occasional supplementary mini-lectures was used. The group sessions in both courses were inquiry-based. The self -selected teams of three or four in the biophysical chemistry course were given guidelines on effective teamwork, and both peer ratings and self-ratings of student performance on teams contributed to the final course grades. In the physical chemistry course there was little difference in performance between the class in question and previous classes that had been taught without group work, but this result is not surprising in view of the fact that the group activities were infrequent and most of the defining criteria for cooperative learning were not met. In the biophysical chemistry course the instructor’s assessment was that the students gained considerable conceptual understanding and problem-solving ability as well as critical thinking and teamwork sklls, but no comparison with a control group was carried out that would elevate the assessment of the course beyond the anecdotal level. The author concludes that the course would have been improved by providing more structure and feedback, maintaining a better balance between individual and group work, and doing more to promote individual accountability (e.g., give more individual tests) and positive interdependence (e.g., establish and rotate assigned roles within teams).A better example of cooperative learning implementation and assessment is provided by Tien et al. (10), who conducted peer-led team learning in a first-semester organic chemistry course over a three-year period and compared the performance of the students with the that of students who had taken a traditional version of the course in the preceding three years. The course instructor, text, examination structure, and grading system were the same for both the treatment and comparison groups. While instruction in teamwork skills is not necessarily a component of PLTL, in this case the peer leaders were trained in group dynamics and group skills and used their training to help the student teams learn to function effectively. It is therefore fair to say that the PLTL implementation described in this study fully qualifies as cooperative learning. On average, the workshop students significantly outscored their traditionally-taught counterparts on individual course exams, final course grades, retention in the course, and percentage earning the minimum acceptable grade of C– for moving on to the second semester organic chemistry course. Similar results were obtained specifically for female students and underrepresented minority students. The treatment group found the workshops and workshop problems their most important aids to learning in the course. Similar findings have been reported for PLTL programs in an organic chemistry class at another institution (13) and in a biology course (14), as well as for a cooperative learning implementation in organic chemistry (15).