Examination of the structural effectiveness of the jigsaw method on students

Abstract

This study aims to examine the effectiveness of different methods by comparing the academic achievement levels of jigsaw groups in the subjects they are experts in and in those they are not experts in. The sample of the study, which was carried out with a pretest posttest experimental design without a control group, consisted of 24 middle school students, 15 boys and 9 girls. A 20-question “science, technology and society achievement test” was used as the data collection tool. The test included 5 questions about each of the 4 topics of expertise assigned to the groups. The achievement that had a reliability coefficient of 0.85 was applied in the jigsaw groups as the pretest and the posttest. Since the data did not show a normal distribution, Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test and Kruskal-Wallis test were used for the analyses. In the analysis, the Mann-Whitney U test with Bonferroni correction was used to determine which groups had significant differences. The results showed that using the jigsaw II method increased the academic achievement of the students in all dimensions of the test. However, a significant difference was found between the success levels of the jigsaw groups in the dimensions of the test. This result showed that students are more successful in their assigned subjects than other subjects.