Modern school is quite performance-oriented. This can be seen especially in the harsh system of achievement scoring with the aim of ensuring the students to get further education. Thus the emphasis is mainly on competition and acquisition of a lot of information. Classes also include a lot of frontal and individual work, which does not correspond to the expectations of modern society. The latter puts emphasis on social skills and conflict resolution. When teaching as transmission it often happens that students do not value knowledge and have a negative attitude towards school subjects, including mathematics. That is why it is important for teachers to be aware of this and try to use the so-called transformational approach of teaching in order to provide a more inclusive approach. One such form is collaborative learning which has a positive effect on knowledge, achievements, self-evaluation and social relationships. As the preparation of collaborative learning requires a lot of thought and time, teachers do not include it in their lessons often enough.
In the master's thesis, we therefore explored the impact of collaborative learning on the acquisition of learning content – geometric concepts, geometric solids and figures, the circle and circle – in the 4th grade of elementary school. We also examined whether collaborative learning affects students' attitude towards mathematics and their attitude towards cooperation with their classmates. We mainly observed the differences between knowledge consolidation through the transmission approach of teaching and knowledge consolidation through collaborative learning. To do this, we conducted a quasi-experiment in which students of two classes of the 4th grade were involved. The first class represented the control group, and the second one the experimental group. In the control group, consolidation of mathematics was given in the form of frontal and individual learning, and in the experimental group in the form of collaborative learning.
The research was carried out in three parts: the initial assessment of pupils' prior knowledge, i.e. the implementation of the pre-test in both groups, the implementation of the experiment, i.e. knowledge consolidation through collaborative learning in the experimental group, and the final examination, i.e. the implementation of the post-test and survey questionnaires in both groups. We have found out that collaborative learning has a positive impact on students' learning achievements. We have also found out that collaborative learning improves pupils' attitude towards mathematics as the school subject and strengthens pupils' social relationships as pupils who learned by collaborative learning were more likely to cooperate with their peers than pupils who did not receive such way of teaching.
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