Abstract
The objective of this ten week pre-posttest study was to measure the impact on public high school students' academic achievement and school related attitudes when Co-op Co-op, a cooperative team learning strategy, was utilized as part of the instructional process in the social science curriculum. The specific focus of the study was to measure the impact use of the Co-op Co-op strategy had on student academic achievement at two levels, information acquisition and concept mastery, and student attitudes towards the social science curriculum and degree of preference in working with other students in completing an instructional task. The implementors of this study were four male graduate students enrolled in the single subject teacher credential program at the University of California, Riverside campus. Each implementor served as his own control and taught the same content to both the control and experimental, or treated, classes for the ten weeks of the study. The thirty questions for each pre-posttest instrument used to measure the student academic achievement were randomly selected from a pool of sixty content-specific questions developed by each of the four implementors. Bloom's six cognitive domain levels were used to classify the questions; the first three levels were classified as information acquisition, with the remaining three classified as concept mastery. Grouping and coding of the questions also insured that half or fifteen of the questions on both the pretest and posttest were composed of questions written at the information acquisition level. Thus, the remaining half of each test was composed of questions written at the concept mastery level. A seven item attitude survey, developed by the study's primary investigator and administered at the same time as each pretest and posttest, was used to measure student attitudes towards the curricular area and degree of preference of working with other students in completing an instructional task. Two types of factorial analysis of variance with repeated measures, a 4 x 2 x 2 analysis, using the factors of teacher, condition and time, and a 2 x 2 analysis, using the factors of condition and time, were conducted on each dependent variable of this study. The results of the analysis of the achievement data found no significant differences between students' achievement scores in the control and the experimental classrooms at either achievement level for three out of the four implementors of this study. For one implementor, teacher three, the 4 x 2 x 2 analysis of variance showed students in his control classroom gaining significantly over the treated, or Co-op Co-op, classroom in their ability to correctly answer the questions written at the information acquisition level. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.).