University students’ online cooperative learning attitudes and its relationship with course achievement

Abstract

This study attempts to examine the effect of online cooperative teaching on students' attitudes towards online cooperative learning (OCLAS) and the relationship between OCLAS and course achievement. Besides, students' views on online collaborative practice were taken. The study was conducted with the 3rd year pre-service teachers who were studying at the primary school mathematics teaching program of a state university in Türkiye and who received the "algebra teaching" course during the spring term of the 2020-2021 academic year. Having the nested mixed method design, quantitative data were collected through use of a one-group pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design and correlational design. The findings revealed no statistically significant difference across the students' attitudes towards online cooperative learning after the implementation. In addition, the interviews conducted with students who had different attitude levels indicated that all of the students took certain advantages of the implementation and that they found the Google tools (docs, slides, forms, spreadsheet) used in group work convenient and useful for collaboration. The findings also suggested no significant relationship between the students’ achievement in the Algebra Teaching Achievement Test and their attitudes towards online cooperative learning.