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Using Cooperative Learning to Integrate Critical Thinking in a Content-Based Writing Progress
Leila Nazari 1, Keivan Mahmoodi 1*
1. English Teaching Department, Malayer Branch, Islamic Azad University, Malayer, Iran.
* Corresponding Author's Email: keivan_mahmoodi@iau-malayer.ac.ir
Abstract – The present study aimed at investigating the effect of cooperative learning and critical thinking on improving EFL learners’ writing in a content-based classroom. Twenty students studying English as a foreign language in an Institute at intermediate level in Khoramabad, Iran, were chosen. An experimental design was utilized for the present study.
The instrument used in this study was individual writing as the pretest and group writing as the posttest. Treatment lasted 14 sessions or about two months, twice in a week. Paired and independent sample t-tests were used to answer the research question. The results of the pretest and posttest in data analysis through statistical procedure such as paired sample t-test confirmed the superiority of the experimental groups and group writing instruction helped to improve group writing.
Keywords: critical thinking, cooperative learning, content-based instruction, brainstorm
I. INTRODUCTION
The role of cooperative learning and critical thinking has been emphasized by many researchers (e.g. Johnson, Johnson Holubec 1994; Kabilan, 2000; Stapleton, 2002) stated that the skills in writing are not acquired but culturally transmitted. The students’ writing skills do not come naturally but are cultivated through much practice and conscious effort. One of the other researcher stated that one of the methods recommended in teaching writing is the incorporation of cooperative learning.
Goodsell, Maher & Tinto (1992) said that Cooperative learning is an approach under the umbrella of collaborative learning. The cognitive model of writing was presented as a mental process involving directed decision making and problem solving in 2004. Critical thinking affects all aspects of our communication; we need it in listening, speaking, reading and writing, Therefore, Carole B.MacKnight (2002) stated that every interaction is affected by critical thinking.
A. Critical Writing
Critical writing is not solely about gathering data, memorizing facts, or restating what others believe; but it is more about vigorous involvement of every individual to comprehend the topic well enough which primarily is a learned proficiency. In order to write a critical essay
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or even brainstorm the central ideas, it is significant to have these two key prerequisites in mind: 1) learn how to think critically, and 2) learn how to write critically.
The reason why both the above-mentioned points need to be learned is that human beings by default do not think critically. The reason behind this is that we have internal biases set up in our mind that we tend to rely upon while making judgments. It is assumed as a vital component of education without which not much education will happen. Brainstorming is a method students can use to generate ideas for writing a paper. With group brainstorming, you can take advantage of the full experience and creativity of all team members. When one member gets stuck with an idea, another member's creativity and experience can take the idea to the next stage. Group brainstorming helps you develop ideas in greater depth with group brainstorming than you can with individual brainstorming. Many of us are nervous of giving feedback, especially when it has to be negative, so the most effective way of developing our teammates is to ensure that you give regular feedback to members of your team. However, if you give and receive feedback regularly, everyone's performance will improve. Renner (1996) said higher-order thinking skills promote higher order learning skills which in turn enable students to reach higher levels of language proficiency. Biehler & Snowman said (1997), based on the synthesis of the main elements of cooperative learning from the erudite cooperative learning researchers, seven elements are discovered. The elements of cooperative learning are group heterogeneity, positive interdependence, promoted interaction, individual accountability, interpersonal skills, and equal opportunities for success and team competition.
B. Critical thinking
Critical thinking is the mode of thinking – about any subject, content, or problem – in which the thinker improves the quality of his or her thinking by skillfully taking charge of the structures inherent in thinking and imposing intellectual standards upon them. (Paul and Elder, 2001). The Paul-Elder framework has three components: 1.The elements of thought (reasoning), 2. The intellectual standards that should be applied to the elements of reasoning, and 3. The intellectual traits associated with a cultivated critical thinker that result from the consistent and disciplined application of the intellectual standards to the elements of thought.
C. Cooperative Learning
Cooperative learning is face-to-face promoted interaction (helping each other learn, applauding success and efforts). Cooperative learning should be applied consistently and systematically, but not overused. Any strategy can be overused and lose its effectiveness.
Cooperative learning is misused if assignments given to groups are not well structured, and students do not have enough time to practice independently the skills and processes that they must master. (Anderson and Simon, 1997)
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Classroom Design Patterns
II. METHODOLOGY A. Participants
The participants of this study were twenty female EFL learners. They were intermediate students and studying in an institute, in Khoramabad, Lorestan, Iran. The participants had a mean age of 16 to 18 and had been studying English for some years in an institute. They were randomly selected from some 20-student classes and, of course, after correcting their papers by three raters, the researcher divided the students into five 4-member groups. They were studying English language two days a week, 90 minutes a day in the institute.
B. Instruments
A pre-test of individually-written essay. At the beginning of this study, before starting the treatment, the participants were given a pre-test of writing an essay to assess their initial ability differences in writing an essay. It was a test of writing essay consisting of a specific title in a content-based text that the learners wrote it individually.
A post-test of writing an essay in a team. The post-test was prepared to be parallel with the pre-test to control instrumentation threats to interval validity. The researcher had a group writing as a post test in this part the students wrote their essays in their groups each group mate just wrote one paragraph and of course the researcher had three raters to correct the drafts after each session. So, at the end of each session the teacher asked each group to deliver their essay, and the expert of each group brought their essays to the teacher and they read them in front of the class if there was time if not they just delivered them to the teacher to assign and correct.
139 C. Procedures
The one class involved in the study was randomly chosen from intermediate students studying English at the institute, in Khorramabad, Iran.
First of all, the researcher gave a test to estimate the learners’ proficiency. In this session the researcher had the learners write on a topic individually. Then, the individuals’ papers were rated by three. After that the teacher gave a sample-five paragraph essay to each learner. Next, she explained how they needed to write a five-paragraph essay in a team and how to work in a group and told them how each paragraph needed to be like.
In the second session, the teacher wrote a topic on the board and then asked the students to speak and write about everything that came in their minds. Each group started to speak and write about the topic as much as they could. The teacher told them it wasn’t important what they wrote; they had to just write everything that came in their minds even if it was not related to the topic much.
One of the members of the group who was more conscious and more knowledgeable about that topic – as an expert member in the team – wrote the first paragraph. So, at the end of this session the teacher asked each group to deliver their essays. The researcher followed the treatment for 6 weeks: executing the cooperative learning lesson plans in the specific content.
Finally, a post-test was administered in which the students were asked to write an essay.
D. Lesson Design
An experimental design was utilized for the present study. Based on the scores from the individual writing five groups were selected as the experimental groups of the study. Individual writing was administered as the pretest of writing improvement. After that, experimental groups received special treatment by using group writing, which is the students wrote the essay all together it means each student wrote one paragraph and then criticized her teammates’
writing. In content-based foreign language instruction, the activities in the language class are specific to the subject matter being taught, and are designed to stimulate students to think and learn through the use of the target language. To minimize the effects of threats to external validity, the researcher randomly selected subjects from two different high schools in Khorramabad, Iran.
III. RESULTS
To analyze the data and to answer the research question already proposed, the students’
performance on essay writing individually and essay writing in a team were analyzed using SPSS software. By showing the numbers and figures in various tables and diagram the researcher tried to extract a number of significant and useful results from the raw data. For presenting the result of the research we competed each of the groups’ drafts with the previous session’s drafts to show the differences and know if the learners’ proficiency improved or not.
In this way, the researcher compared the second chart with the first one, and compared the third one with the second one, and this procedure continued to the end and of course at last the
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teacher compared the last chart of the last session with the first one that was related to the individual drafts.
A. Research Question
The present study tried to answer the question raised about:
1. Do critical thinking and cooperative learning have any significant effect on the EFL learners writing improvement?
B. Data Analysis
After collecting the quantitative data on two variables (the participants’ awareness of lexical cohesion and learners’ reading comprehension) for each of the students in the sample, it was time to calculate the correlation between the scores of two groups through SPSS Computer Software (version 22), two independent sample t-test were used to compare differences between the two groups.
Table 1: Pre-Test (Students’ scores at session 1)
The above table 1 shows all of the learners’ scores in an individuals’ writing. By using this table the researcher could put the learners in the groups and it helped that all of the groups had the same teammate it means that in all of the groups we had top, middle, and weak learner and of course we used it as pre-test.
Table 2: Post-Test (Students’ scores at session 14)
14th session Group 1 Group 2 Group 3 Group 4 Group 5
Rater1 90 89 89 90 90
Rater2 89 87 89 89 89
Rater3 89 88 88 90 90
1st session
S 1
S 2
S 3
S 4
S 5
S 6
S 7
S 8
S 9
S 10
S 11
S 12
S 13
S 14
S 15
S 16
S 17
S 18
S 19
S 20
Rater1 53 54 54 53 53 55 56 54 54 53 54 54 55 54 55 56 56 55 54 55
Rater2 54 54 53 53 53 54 55 53 53 54 55 54 54 55 54 55 56 55 54 54
Rater3 54 53 53 54 53 54 55 54 54 54 54 54 55 56 55 54 55 56 54 55
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Going through the tables, one can see that the learners' writing improvement was significantly correlated with their critical thinking and cooperative learning. All of these tables shows that the students’ proficiency improved, for example if you look at the 2nd table and 14th table you see that all of the scores improve step by step and again the teacher had another comparison that made us to be sure about the result of the research, the 1sttable involved individual scores as a pre-test and the last table involved scores as a post-test and the conclusion was all of the learners’ proficiency improved. The researcher compared the scores in other way, she compared each session’s table with the next session’s table and in this way showed the learning improvement session by session.
Table 3: Students’ Scores on Session 2 2nd
session
Group 1 Group 2 Group 3 Group 4 Group 5
Rater1 51 52 51 53 51
Rater2 52 51 52 52 52
Rater3 52 51 52 53 52
∑Mean = 53.19 – 89.06 = 35.87
As the table show, it is the first session that all of the students work together so, it’s their first experience in a group writing.
Table 4. The scores related to the all sessions
2nd session
Group 1 Group 2 Group 3 Group 4 Group 5
Rater1 51 52 51 53 51
Rater2 52 51 52 52 52
Rater3 52 51 52 53 52
sessi on1
sessi on2
sessi on3
sessi on4
sessi on 5
sessi on 6
sessi on 7
sessi on 8
sessi on 9
sessi on 10
sessi on 11
sessi on 12
sessi on 13
sessi on 14 score 53.19 51.8 53.4 56.33 61.2 65.13 68.66 72.33 74.33 76.2 78.86 84.13 85.4 89.06 Series 2
Series 3
53.19 51.8 53.4 56.33 61.2 65.13368.66 72.3374.33 76.2 78.8684.13 85.4 89.06
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
Table of the scores related to the all sessions
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As we see, the chart indicates the strong effect of cooperative learning and critical thinking on the students’ writing improvement.
Table 5 Paired Samples Statistics
Mean N Std. Deviation
Std. Error Mean Pair 1 pretest 54.2460 20 .76377 .17078
posttest 89.0620 20 .66118 .14784
In order to check the differences in writing scores between the participants in group writing in two different administrations i.e., pre-test and post-test through two individual writing and group writing ,paired / Samples t-test was run. The performance of participants was clarified in table 5. The table displays the mean scores for pre-test and post-test were 54.2460 and 89.0620 respectively. It revealed that the participants in two tests did differently i.e., the scores in post-test were greater than the scores in pre-test.
Table 6. Paired Samples Correlations Group writing
N Correlation Sig.
Pair 1 pretest & posttest 20 .312 .181
Table 6 titled Paired Samples Correlations provides the correlation between pre-test and post-test. In the table, it is clear that the correlation is .312 which is rather high.
Table 7. Paired Samples Test of group writing
Paired Differences
t df
Sig. (2- tailed) Mean
Std.
Deviation
Std. Error Mean
95% Confidence Interval of the Difference
Lower Upper
Pair 1 pretest - posttest -3.48160E1 .83997 .18782 -35.20912 -34.42288 -185.366 19 .000
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Paired Sample t-test was run to compare the mean scores of the group writing in two different administrations i.e., on the pre-test and post-test. Consequently, it is essential to account for the statistical significance of the difference between the mean scores of the group in two different administrations. Table 7 shows the mean difference was 3.4. The significance level was .000 and it was less than 0.05, it could be claimed that writing in a group was effective. Therefore, null hypothesis number 1 was rejected.
The graph related to the sessions and the mean. (Figure-1)
As this graph shows, there is a big difference between all of the sessions and we can conclude that most of the groups could have a high improvement by group writing session by session.
V. CONCLUSION
In this study an attempt was made to further our understanding of the significant relationship between Cooperative Learning and EFL learners’ Critical Thinking performance.
As seen above, the results obtained from the analysis of the data revealed that there is a relationship between Cooperative Learning and EFL learners’ Critical Thinking performance.
In other words make students’ improvement in writing.
The results also showed a positive correlation between the two independent variables of Cooperative Learning and EFL learners’ Critical Thinking performance. In following, the results of the analysis are discussed regarding the relationships between and among the variables of the study. We can conclude that there are high and positive inter correlations among the scores of all sessions depends on the raters’ scores. As researchers and theorists have long maintained, language and thinking skills are closely related and inseparable (Piaget, 1971; Renner, 1996; Vacca, & Gove, 1995; Vygotsky, 1962) and also the comprehension of content area knowledge, made the learning meaningful (Krashen, 1985) and enhanced the students’ academic language skills (Chamot & O’Malley, 1986, 1987; Cummins, 1981, 1984).
In this study we understood that all of the students liked to work in a group work and complete
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their works by helping and using teammates’ help, they said that it caused to make them be more eager and it increased their confidence.
A. Limitations of the study
Needless to say, just like any other empirical study in EFL, this research has a number of limitations some of which could have had some impact on the findings of the study and have restricted the generalizability of the results. The following are some of the limitations over which the researchers had little or no control: First reason is the number of participants could have come from a more diversified background; hence a higher reliability of test scores could have been achieved. This was not practical due to the time limit and scope of the study. The second reason was limited to students learning English at institute. The study can be extended to larger, diversified sample. The third one due to a number of considerations, student's age level was not taken into account as a variable in this study. Necessary steps can be taken to take care of this issue in other research studies and the last one is that only female students formed the sample population.
Male students were excluded from the study. The research can include both sexes and the role of gender can be explored, too.
Throughout this study, several questions occurred to the researcher. The under–
mentioned topics are proffered for further research, hoping that someone would find them intriguing enough to pursue. First of all this study was administered in an institute so we recommended that it will hold in the schools too and the teachers use this method in their schedule. Second was administered to intermediate students. It is recommended that the study be replicated with more advanced students, too. The result can certainly be revealing.
Eventually, the present study is capable of being replicated with paying special attention to GENDER in the student's process of writing development.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Our unlimited gratitude goes to our professors in the Azad university of Malayer, Iran and to our dear family who helped us in completing the article and finally to our dear God who made all these things possible.
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147 APPENDIX 1
Scale or evaluating the expository writing Name: ………..Date: ……….
Rubric: Pre-test & Post-test Scoring the Samples
Give the student a score of 0 if there is no evidence of the element.
Give the student a score of 1 for each element at the emergent or minimum level.
Give the student a score of 3 for each element at a satisfactory level.
Give the student a score of 5 for each element at the mastery level.
Evaluating the elements of a piece of expository writing
The author of this summary …… Points
Earned
ORGANIZATION
States the main idea of the passage.
Places details related to the main idea in the middle of the summary.
Restates the main idea in the conclusion.
Groups related ideas.
Uses a logical sequence.
CONTENT
Maintains consistent focus on the source Concisely states the main idea of the passage.
Uses judgment to select significant details.
Combines idea to condense information.
Clarifies in simple terms the content of the original passage.
STYLE
Uses own words to write the summary.
Maintains the intent of the original writer.
Maintains the accuracy of the original writer.
Is brief and concise.
Uses a variety of sentence structures, both simple and complex.
MECHANICS Indents paragraphs.
Uses the conventions of capitalization for titles and proper nouns.
Uses conjunctions to combine information in sentences, uses commas.
Correctly in combined sentences.
Uses appropriate end punctuation.
Total Points (100)
