EXPERIENCES IN COOPERATIVE GROUPS FOCUSED ON FINAL DEGREE PROJECTS IN SCIENCES

Cooperative group work is an excellent pedagogical tool to improve the skills of students that are immerse in the final degree project in Sciences. This paper provides an overview of the study carried out to shed some light on which is the best way to achieve higher academic outcomes with students highly motivated. We planned a cooperative learning experience, based on a virtual workshop, ``I Congreso Virtual de Iniciación a la Investigación Científica´´, where projects elaborated by small groups (3 or 4 students) were presented as posters, which would be published in a special blog platform[1,2] created and tuned for this virtual event. At this point, we decided to move forward, to help students actively promote each other´s learning and the results of these projects were presented for discussion and dissertation as flash papers along the classes, with the supervision of the teachers. They acted drawing attention to aspects of interest, encouraging the students to seek for new perspectives and giving them a checklist of the essential elements to consider in preparing and planning an oral presentation to success.

Although numerous studies have been published[3,4] to highlight the benefits of cooperative group work, there are not many experiences focused on the development of new innovative teaching activities dealing with these final degree projects since these degrees are quite new. The results based on a survey conducted by the authors show that when working cooperatively together, they achieve the tools to manage stressful situations when presenting their results in the project defense, they shared and respect to different points of view from different perspectives to take into account and they acquired social skills to facilitate communication that promoted student learning across a range of curriculum areas.

The students involved in this project belong to seven different degrees from Universities of Seville and Huelva. The group project is formed by eleven teachers with a wide experience in Education, Research and Innovation. As a whole, 38 posters were virtually presented to this workshop and near 5000 students visited the blog, which had a high impact on our Universities. II Plan Propio de Docencia de la Universidad de Sevilla provided funding to this teaching innovation project.[5]

References:
[1] http://initiationinresearch.blogspot.com.es/ (1 December 2015).
[2] La docencia universitaria y las tecnologías Web 2.0. Renovación e innovación en el Espacio Europeo. Julio
[3] Cabero- Almenara, Eloy López Meneses y María del Carmen Llorente Cejudo. 2009. ISBN: 978-84-96378-51-3.
[4] R. M. Gilles. Structuring Cooperative Group Work in Classroom. International Journal of Educational Research, 39 (2003) 35-49. b) V. Battistich, D. Solomon, K. Delucchi. Interaction processes and student outcomes in cooperative learning groups. The Elementary School Journal, (1994) 19-32.
[5] Collaboration and Social Networking in Higher Education. Colaboración y redes sociales en la enseñanza virtual. Gewerc-Barujel, Adriana and Montero-Mesa, Lourdes and Lama-Penín. Comunicar, 2014, vol. 21, n. 42, pp. 55-63.
[6] https://ppropiodocencia.us.es/ (1 December 2015).