Teachers need to help students boost their thinking skills. The traditional teaching strategy is no longer effective as it does not motivate students to become higher-level thinkers. In traditional group learning, students work in groups with no attention paid to group functioning. In contrast, group work in cooperative learning is systematically prepared, structured, and monitored.
Research shows that cooperative learning has numerous positive outcomes. At the academic level, it promotes essential thinking strategies such as problem solving, decision making, critical thinking, and creative thinking.In addition, the mechanisms of Kagan cooperative learning structurescontribute to the development of certain interpersonal functions …show more content…
Learners understand and empathize with the points of view and feelings of others. Interaction with points of view different from one's own produces higher level thinking. Students or learners have their respective information and mode of interpreting that information. Some have the tendency to persist in his or her own way of thinking until they are challenged by interacting with others with different information and different way of explaining the information. At that point, learners will be transferred to higher level thinking. (Kagan, 1999)
In addition to academic achievement, research has shown that heterogeneous cooperative teams have transformed race relations in positive ways in the United States resulting in increasing cross-race friendships and mutual understanding. Students in cooperative learning teams increase feelings of social and academic esteem as long as they do better academically and more appreciated by their peers. (Kagan, …show more content…
There are two fundamental issues to be taken into consideration when applying Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT). First of all, the researcher must identify the suitable instrument that will function successfully in the eight to ten week time span of the study. The test-retest results of (TTCT) must be reliable for evaluating and reporting changes in group characteristics over a period of a few weeks. The second issue is to make sure that the testing device used will adequately tackle the creative differences among the treatment groups on the pretest and