The effect of cooperative learning on students' learning approaches, academic performance and learning retention

The increasing efforts made to provide learners with better education by school authorities in recent years have caused an increase in the studies of the most effective instructional design in heterogeneous classes. These studies have mainly been carried out in the field of instructional design. One of the learner centred instructions which has been brought into by the studies in the field of instructional design is cooperative instructional design. The aim of this study is to research the effect of variables such as learning approaches, academic achievement, learning retention regarded important for learning-teaching process by focusing on the collaborative/cooperative learning, In this study pretest-posttest -delayed posttest control group experimental research design was applied using third year students from the Machine Department of Sultanahmet Anatolian Vocational Upper Secondary School in "Strength of Materials" course. After testing the validity and reliability of the academic achievement test prepared by the researcher and the subject-matter experts was conducted before the experiment began and after the experiment was complete. One month after the posttest, delayed posttest was applied to examine the learning retention. Learning Approaches Inventory developed by Biggs was used to find out the learning styles of students participated in this study. Translational accuracy, validity and reliability analyses of the inventory were carried out by the researcher. The analyses of data acquired from the test indicated following findings: The findings supported the hypotheses that "the scores obtained from the posttest of the students receiving instruction within the frame of the cooperative instructional design application are higher than those of lecture based instructional design when pretest scores are taken under control" and hypothesis that "the deep learning scores obtained from the posttest of students receiving instruction by the cooperative instructional design application are higher than those of lecture based instructional design when pretest deep learning scores are controlled." The findings did not serve to support the hypothesis that "the scores obtained from the deleyed posttest of students receiving instruction by the cooperative instructional design are higher than those of lecture based instructional design when posttest scores are taken under control" and hypothesis that "The findings did not support the hypotheses that "the surface learning scores obtained from the posttest of students receiving instruction by the cooperative instructional design application are lower than those of lecture based instructional design when pretest surface learning scores are controlled." Key words: instructional design, cooperative learning, learning approach, deep learning, surface learning ?'I