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Effects of Prior Knowledge on Cooperative Learning Outcome.

Cooperative learning is a major teaching method which is used by many instructors as their teaching framework. It has been proven better than individual and competitive teaching methods by raising higher group achievements and individual achievements with more diverse reasoning and logic thinking, and more creative ideas. Many researchers make their efforts in promoting the outcomes of cooperative learning from different viewpoints. One of them is Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), which emphasizes that teachers and learners with higher capability can support other learners to develop their ZPD through proper scaffolding. Prior Knowledge plays an important role in scaffolding. In order to maximize the effect of scaffolding, learners supported by scaffolding must possess enough prior knowledge. At the same time, teachers must consider the whole teaching progress and it is difficult to be aware of every individual learner¡¦s learning progress and offer adaptive assistance to each of them. Thus, we propose two mechanisms: knowledge diagnostic and learning material developed by using IT techniques to promote learners¡¦ prior knowledge in a specific domain. Students were given different mechanisms and divided into twenty groups to resolve their cooperative tasks. Their cooperative learning outcomes were measured by tasks achievement and perceived of cooperation process that is composed of perceived of cooperation extent, perceived of task conflict and perceived of emotional conflict. The result shows that the combination of knowledge diagnostic and learning material can promote students¡¦ prior knowledge in the domain we selected. The result of cooperative learning outcomes shows that there is a positive relationship between prior knowledge and task achievement, and a positive relationship between prior knowledge and perceived of task conflict, but there is no significant relationship between prior knowledge and perceived of cooperation extent and nor between prior knowledge and perceived of emotional conflict.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0719107-115901
Date19 July 2007
CreatorsChuang, Yu-chen
ContributorsStephen J.H. Ynag, Nian-Shing Chen, Gwo-Jen Hwang
PublisherNSYSU
Source SetsNSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive
LanguageCholon
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
Sourcehttp://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0719107-115901
Rightsunrestricted, Copyright information available at source archive

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