The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of cooperative learning in elementary school physical education classes.
To conduct this investigation, a ball game was played by students in one class at one school over 8 one-hour PE sessions (6th-grade 31 students in total).The lessons were based on the concept of cooperative learning. The class was divided into 8 groups and 3 of those groups were observation targets. The data were collected and analyzed according to the following three measurements: “Students’ dialogues,” “Students’ social skills” and “Teacher’s feedback.”
This study resulted in two main findings.
1) There was a big difference between the three groups in “Students’ dialogues” and “Students’ social skills.” In one group, all members had interactive dialogue. In the other two groups, only one or two students dominated the dialogue.
2) The teacher gave positive feedback, but not frequently to the group of students.
