International Journal of Educational Innovation and Research
Volume 3, Number 1, 2024, pp. 62-74
DOI: https://doi.org/10.31949/ijeir.v3i1.7163
ISSN: 2810-0808
This is an open access article under the CC BY-SA license.
Copyright © 2024 by Author.
Cooperative learning as a strategy of improving mathematics
performance and attitudes
Matthew Bugre Ndebil
1
, Clement Ayarebilla Ali
2
*
1
CK Tedam University of Technology and Applied Sciences, Navrongo, Upper East Region, Ghana
2
University of Education, Winneba, Ghana
*Corresponding Author: aliclement83@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
There has been an increasing concerns that the traditional
instructional methods militate against students‘ performance and
positive attitudes towards school mathematics. This study
employs cooperative learning strategy to provide an innovation
as a way of ameliorating the canker. We utilised the quasi-
expermental (prepost non-equivalent) design. In this design, two
senior high schools selected. One school was the experimental
(SHS A) and the other was the control (SHS B). A sample of 224
students were assigned to the experimental (110) and control
(114) groups. After treatments, mathematics achievement tests
were used to gather the data. The data was analysed with means,
standard deviations, percentages, p-values and t-statistics. The
outcomes revealed that students who had tutorials in the
cooperative strategy performed better than those who had tuition
through the traditional. Even within the experimental group, there
was no statistically significance differences between boys and
girls. It was concluded that students‘ performance and attitudes
toward learning mathematics were positively enhanced by
cooperative learning. It was therefore recommended that
stakeholders make conscious efforts to inspire teachers to model
more cooperative learning techniques in mathematics instruction.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 2023-10-20
Accepted 2023-12-28
KEYWORDS
Attitudes
Cooperative learning
Mathematics performance
Quasi-experimental
Strategy
INTRODUCTION
All over the world, new curricula seek to focus on task-based cooperative teaching and learning. Some
of these are think-pair-share, team teaching, random selection and cooperative learning (Appiah, 2011; Carss,
2018; Lee, Li, & Shahrill, 2018; Ministry of Education, 2019; Moghaddam & Heidari, 2018). However, studies
(Benning, & Agyei, 2016; Fletcher, 2018) suggest that these changes have not significantly improved upon
the teaching and learning of mathematics. Two major reasons attributed to the abysmal learning outcomes
are inadequate and/or little local content interactional-instructional models and low technological
pedagogical content knowledge of teachers and students. This study seeks to fill these yawning gaps with
cooperative learning method. In the cooperative learning, three interrelated theories have been proposed to
beef their strengths and weaknesses. The quasi-experimental method has also been employed to test the
method and infer its gender sensitivity. We also employed robust statistically analyses to link mathematics
performance with students‘ attitudes and gender differences.
Bruner (1985) describes cooperative learning as a style of methodology where students with varying
performance levels collaborate to accomplish a common objective. Collaborative learning is a teamwork that
exhibits greater levels of reasoning and information retention than those who work independently (Ministry