A rose for emily symbolism, theme and irony
... assigned to them. They ensure that they understand it well enough to prepare themselves of the peer tutoring. Then the students return to their home group. The students then teach to their co-members what they have understood of what they have studied. They also learn from the other members of the other subtopics. After the group study, a 20-item multiple choice test about the topic, Living Organisms was applied and taken to evaluate the students’ achievement. This was constructed by the researchers and then validated by experts. A modified form of the Osgood Semantic Differential, a rating scale, was used to measure the attitudes of the students towards science. It consists of twelve bipolar couplets of adjectives: important/unimportant, neat/messy, safe/dangerous, interesting/dull, valuable/worthless, orderly/cluttered, understandable/confusing, exciting/boring, comforting/threatening, simple/difficult, clear/mysterious and easy/hard. The scale was measured by assigning numbers from one through seven to the space between the couplets of the evaluative factor. Findings of the study showed that the students who underwent cooperative jigsaw learning had higher achievement, based on the scores on the test, than those who went through the traditional method. Because of the jigsaw cooperative learning, students were more pressured and energized to study since they know they have the responsibility to their own peer and that is to share information and make sure their classmates understand the topic well. In addition to this, positive attitudes towards science were more evident to the jigsaw group students. Furthermore, the students of the traditional method say that the classes were rather dull and boring. A number of recommendations were suggested and these are: (1) further studies should determine the long-term effect of this type of instruction over a whole-semester or a full-year, (2) more research should be conducted on additional samples from other topics (3) additional studies need to be carried on by employing the jigsaw cooperative method to agree on its effectiveness on the students’ academic achievement in science and their attitudes towards it. Reflection: This study strongly supports the advantages of cooperative learning over competition and individualized learning in a wide array of learning tasks. Compared to competitive or individual work, cooperation leads to higher group and individual achievement, higher-quality reasoning strategies, more frequent transfer of these from the group to individual members and more new ideas and solutions to problems. In addition, the study promotes that the students working in cooperative groups tend to be more intrinsically motivated, intellectually curious, caring of others, and psychologically healthy. That is not to say that competition and individual work should not be valued and encouraged, however. For example, competition is appropriate when there can be only one winner, as in a sports event, and individualistic effort is appropriate when the goal is personally beneficial and has no influence on the goals of others. For me, I do not totally agree that the jigsaw cooperative learning is overall effective to all students, despite of their kinds. I myself am a proof of it. Honestly, I do not really learn when I work in groups. I prefer to work individually because I tend to become more enthusiased and interested when I know that I am the only one responsible for my achievement. Furthermore, I am not comfortable of teaching because I do not have the talent o teach a person of what is inside my head and make him understand well the topic through me. But when I read the study I found out that students who work individually must compete against their peers to gain praise or other forms of rewards and...