The Learning strategies, attitudes and performance levels of succesfull and unsuccesfull problem solvers in cooperative and traditional classes

The aim of this research is to find out learning strategies, attitudes and performance levels of successful and unsuccessful problem solvers in cooperative and traditional classes. The subjects of the research were fourth graders at a primary school. Pre- and post-test design was used for the research. The "learning together" technique, which is a cooperative one, was used in the experimental group and traditional methods in the control group during a period of seven weeks. The scale for problem solving strategies, video records and students' drafts were used to find out the learning strategies employed by the successful and unsuccessful problem solvers. The achievement test was administered to determine their achievement levels and the scale for attitudes to find out their attitudes towards problem solving. The measurement instruments were used in the pre- and post-test. Arithmetic mean, standard deviation, t-test, percentage and differences between percentages were made use of to analyze the data. According to the results of the research, the achievement leVel of the experimental group was significantly higher than that of the control group. In addition, the attitudes of the subjects in the experimental group were significantly more positive than those of the ones in the control group. Significant differences were observed between the learning strategies employed by the successful and unsuccessful problem solvers in the experimental and control groups in the pre-test. A similarity was observed between the strategies employed by the successful and unsuccessful problem solvers in the experimental group according to the results of the post-test.