A Justice Site
Local Hub Sites
Latest update: November 5, 2000.
jeannecurran@habermas.org.
This Multiple Interpretation Practice is based on an article in the Journal of Statistics Education v.6, n.3 (1998), "Using Cooperative Learning in a Large Introductory Statistics Class," by Rhonda C. Magel, North Dakota State University.Click on any of the linked numbers or letters to see jeanne's lecture notes on that answer.
- Approximately what percentage of the grade in "Using Cooperative Learning in a Large Introductory Statistics Class" depends on cooperative learning?
jeanne's lecture notes:
Scroll down about two thirds of the file to paragraph number 27: "27 Three exams are given in my class during the course of one semester. Eighty percent of a student's grade comes from these exams." Since paragraph number 27 says that 80 % of the grade is based on tests, 20% might be correct. Are there any other clues?
jeanne's lecture notes:
"27 Three exams are given in my class during the course of one semester. Eighty percent of a student's grade comes from these exams." This says that 80% of the grade was based on individual exams. So this is not a valid response to the question.
jeanne's lecture notes:
50% doesn't seem to fit anywhere with the quotations cited on 80% of the grade being based on exams. So "c" is not a correct response to the question.
The whole grade is based on cooperative learning.
jeanne's lecture notes:
The quotation on 80 % of the grade being based on exams means that "d" cannot be the correct response to the question.
None of the actual grade is based on cooperative learning.
jeanne's lecture notes:
"e" cannot be the correct response because we know that "27 Three exams are given in my class during the course of one semester. Eighty percent of a student's grade comes from these exams."
Did statistics students at Iowa learn better because of cooperative learning?
jeanne's lecture notes:
Caution with the word "because." Remember that causality is hard to establish in social science because there are so many factors to consider. Look at Magel's wording in her conclusion:
In Paragraph 35 of Using Cooperative Learning in a Large Introductory Statistics Class, Magel says: "35 Preliminary findings based on comparing exam scores from this Spring Semester's class with the class from the previous spring semester indicate that there was a significant increase on the average exam score when cooperative learning exercises were used. A smaller percentage of students also scored below 70. There were too many other factors involved to claim that cooperative learning exercises were responsible for this, but these findings merit further investigation."
Magel describes a problem with monitoring the class' compliance with cooperation in learning groups. How does she describe the problem?
jeanne's lecture notes:
In paragraph 19, about halfway down the file: "One downfall of this process is that it is hard to monitor in a large class to what extent the first critical feature of cooperative learning, namely everyone on a learning team is responsible for the other team members' learning, is met. This was certainly encouraged by telling students that answers should be discussed and checked with other team members, and by not allowing students to turn in worksheets early. I also required each student to list the names of the other team members on their sheet."
Magel is providing here an excellent example of restraint in interpreting results. She is not extrapolating her results beyond what makes sense in the context in which she obtained those results.
Do you think that Magel would have been justified in writing:
How have we dealt with the problem of compliance in cooperative learning?
jeanne's lecture notes:
By recognizing that the sharing of expertise is a positive measure of learning, and by accepting that as one way for you to let the teacher know what you have learned. Also by recognizing the importance of seeking peers as knowledge sources and asking for their expertise. By making sharing one of our values.
What do you think Fellman would say about "monitoring cooperation?"
jeanne's lecture notes:
I think Fellman would say that the very concept of monitoring is adversarial and involves an unstated assumption that the class must be forced to cooperate with one another. I think he would say that that is a form of denial on the part of students and teacher that learning is a cooperative enterprise and that they themselves are a part of the adversarial pattern that has developed in higher education.
I think that Fellman would suggest that if we can grow into a paradigm of mutuality there will be no need to "monitor cooperative learning."
jeanne's lecture notes:
Check out the elaborateness of the scheme to correct an observed difference in the ability of "weaker" and "stronger" students to reason. See Paragraphs 14, 15, little more than a third of the way down the file. And all this elaborate planning merely created random groups in which the student "who had poor quantitative reasoning skills" (paragraph 12) had a random chance of being in a team with a student who had stronger quantitative reasoning skills. Much is made of how these teams could be formed in the auditorium in approximately two minutes.
But Magel also notes: "34 The random method of assigning students to teams might not always give the best team formations. Weaker students could still end up with weaker students, but it was the best I could hope for since it would be hard to know all of the students' abilities. I also randomly assigned students to new teams each time a cooperative learning exercise was to be done. If a student was on a team that did not work well together the first time, the student would at least have a chance of being on a team that worked well together for the next exercise."Link this discussion conceptually to the "imaginary."
jeanne's lecture notes:
The imaginary is the ability to see things in new and different ways, the need to explore alternatives, the curiosity to see where things will or might lead when we push to the edge. It is this ability to imagine the different that guides us in discovering alternative ways of relating to one another and to our world.
Agency is the power and skill to make decisions about things which control our lives, and the imagainary enhances that power and ability by increasing the alternatives we can see.
In this report on cooperative learning, we see tentative agreement between students, teachers, and test score results that cooperative learning improves results on the positivistic and qualitative measures of students' learning:
"29 Exam Number 1 covers topics 1 through 4 as mentioned earlier. In the class in which cooperative learning exercises were not used, 8.28% of the students' scores on this exam were below 60, and 8.92% of the scores were in the 60's. When cooperative learning exercises were used, only 2.03% of the students' scores were below 60, and 5.08% were in the 60's. This gives some indication that weaker students may benefit. Similarly, on Exam Number 3, there was a lower percentage of scores below 70 when cooperative learning exercises were used. This exam covers topics 8 and 9 as mentioned earlier. When cooperative learning exercises were not used, 28.76% of the students scored below 60, and 18.95% scored in the 60's. This changed to 20% scoring below 60 and 13.51% scoring in the 60's when the exercises were used.""26 It should be noted that throughout the semester, I interspersed cooperative learning exercises with the active learning technique that I had been using earlier. That is, I continued at times to let students do worksheets either by themselves or with one or two other students. The exercises on these worksheets did not require one to interact with other students in order to complete them. I used both techniques in this class, because some students felt more comfortable choosing the students that they wanted to work with (or in some cases alone), but at times I wanted to mix students up and force them to interact with other students. I wanted to make sure that the weaker students participated in some interactions and did not always work with other weaker students."
And yet we still see the constraints imposed by the hegemony of the dominant discourse. I would very much like to hear your comparisons to the decisions we have made in our CSUDH classes on many of these same issues.