Influence Of External Scripts On Group Collaborative Learning With Different Grouping Strategy

Collaborative learning has become an important teaching strategy in contemporary education.The main grouping strategies commonly used in actual teaching include teacher-designated grouping and students' voluntary grouping.Past literature has investigated whether and how these two grouping strategies will affect the learning performance.In these studies,it will be found that these two approaches have their own advantages and disadvantages,some of them reported no significant difference in terms of learning outcome though students in voluntary grouping condition reported greater motivation.This could be due to the inefficient collaboration in the voluntary grouping condition.External scripts are supplementary materials used to make up for these shortcomings when students lack practical experience in collaboration and do not have enough knowledge to support them in completing cooperative activities in a cooperative learning environment.At present,most researches on external scripts at home and abroad agree that external scripts can promote the effect of student group cooperative learning.Therefore,this research proposes a hypothesis that if the same external script is introduced,can the shortcomings of the voluntary grouping strategies be improved?What if the same design is introduce in the teacher-designated condition?Will there be some difference?In view of this,this article takes students in the first-year information technology course of the junior high school in Xiamen Wuyuan Second Experimental School as samples,and used a 2*2 yoked quasi-experimental design.This research manipulated the students in four classes with same basic conditions into groups with different grouping strategy,and the availability of external script is taken as a new variable('teacher-designated grouping*with external script','teacher-designated grouping*without external script','students' voluntary grouping*with external script',‘students'voluntary grouping*without external script').Students' learning outcomes were measured afterwards and multivariate analysis of variance was conducted to investigate the effects of manipulation.It was found that availability of external scripts does improve the effect of group collaborative learning in all conditions,and the effect is significant;compare the two groups with external scripts under different grouping strategy,it is found that external scripts have greater impact on the voluntary grouping condition.Students in the voluntary grouping strategy with external script yielded best performance.At present,there are only few relevant literatures similar to this study that combines grouping strategies with external scripts for joint discussion.Therefore,this study is an innovation for this theme,as well as a new attempt.