AN EXPERIENCE OF COLLABORATIVE LEARNING AND INNOVATION IN CHEMISTRY

The creation of the European Higher Education Area requires changing the traditional approach to education whereby the student receives information from the teacher, to a new approach where the student has an active role in the learning process. It is within this framework, where the cooperative learning acquires a great relevance.

Cooperative learning can be defined as any activity carried out by two or more students working together to explore a topic, or produce something to improve their skills. In this environment the students always work among peers and the teacher acts as a guide. The teacher assigns a group of students a comprehensive task, which is broken down into a series of individual tasks to each group member. The most prominent features of this type of learning are personal responsibility, interdependence with other members and group dynamics [1]. In collaborative work, a student can not solve by itself the task assigned to the group, but depends on the work of their peers. This means that each member of the group must take the responsibility for his/her specific task, so that the goals achieved by each member of the group can be coordinated together to develop successfully the global task assigned.

With this educative strategy, the active roll of the student inside-&-outside the classroom is promoted. By means of dynamics activities working in groups, the students are called to reach the previously proposed ‘specific’ as well as ‘cross-disciplinary’ learning competencies. Thus, the teacher exercises a tutorial task.

In this communication, we present the results of a collaborative and interdisciplinary work carried out within the framework of the PIE (Teaching Innovation Project) in Chemistry from the University of Valencia. The work has been proposed to several groups of the last grade level in chemistry. Finally, the works were exposed and presented by the students in the form of a poster to the rest of students and teachers. Each group defended its work in a session that resembled a conference in order to the students acquire the necessary tools not only to prepare a job, but also to present it.

[1] Slavin, R.E., Cooperative learning: theory, research and practice, Allun and Bacon, Boston, 1995.