Influence of cooperative learning in the development of learning to learn skill in the childhood

Abstract

ABSTRACT

Within the educational framework, established by the Spanish law, Ley Orgánica de Educación and Real Decreto 1513/2006, 7 December, among others, the learning to learn skill has been inserted. Within the sociocognitive framework, the competence to learning to learn could be developed with the use of cooperative methods and a strategic instruction. This research is a part of a complex comparative study between educative methodologies and learning tolearn skill in math and literature tasks. Specifically, the aim of this study was to compare cooperative methods and traditional methods regarding metacognitive and cognitive development and performance. This is a cuasiexperimental study, with a control group and experimental group during three months. Thus, two groups have been compared: a) group of students trained in the use of learning cooperative methods; b) group that has followed the usual material. Participants were 44 students enrolled in the first grade of Primary Education, with six years old. The students completed one scale to determine their learning strategies in contextualized tasks. The results show that the intervention has produced positive improvements in the planning skills, not so much in the representation of language, inference, execution, transfer and metacognition because, in our view, the short time of intervention. In conclusion, the effectiveness of cooperative learning methods is evident in other empirical studies where the intervention time was higher than in our study. Thus, we believe that the educational intervention, using this methodology must be constant in ordinary situations and it is part of an empirical study should be at least a year to build, with certain guarantees, improvements in this competition. Likewise, we believe that planning didactic should integrating specific tasks that facilitate the acquisition of the self-regulated learning.