A Study On Cooperative Learning Task Design

As one of the most influential educational reforms in recent decades, cooperative learning has become a worldwide cooperative learning sensation, promoted the change of student learning patterns, and pushed the classroom teaching reform forward. Therefore, exploring the possible paths to improve the quality of cooperative learning becomes an inevitable demand in cooperative learning research. Moreover, some studies have showed that the success of cooperative learning is closely related to the quality of cooperative learning task design.This research adopts the case study method selecting 11 teachers in S school in Pudong District in Shanghai as research objects.The researcher tries his best to participate in the teachers’ teaching activities so as to unveil the current situation of cooperative learning task design in S school as truthful and objective as possible. Through various research methods including interviews, classroom observations and text analysis, real problems in cooperative learning task are to be found.Regards to the cognitive status of cooperative learning task design, there are four analytical dimensions. Firstly, teachers are generally aware of cooperative value and significance in cooperative learning task, but rarely realize the different functions and forms of different types of cooperative learning tasks. Secondly, teachers pay more attention to the teachers’ teaching value, neglecting the students’ learning value. Thirdly, teachers excessively emphasize preparations before class, while lacking considerations on teaching process. Fourthly, teachers’ focus on student characteristic analysis has reached a consensus.With respect to the practical status of cooperative learning task design, there are three analytical dimensions. On the level of congruence between instructional objectives and learning tasks, it performs good in Categorical Concurrence,Balance of Representation and Range-of-Knowledge Correspondence, while poor in Depth-of-Knowledge Consistency. On the level of relevance degree between students’ learning characteristics and learning tasks, teachers pay more attention to micro level of student characteristics, neglecting macro and medium level. Moreover, the results of student characteristic analysis are not fully applied to task design. On the level of matching degree between cooperation task types and cooperation forms, it shows high matching degree. On the level of clarity degree of cooperative task requirements and process specifications, teachers lack enough consideration on cooperative rules, requirements and process. Moreover, some obscure and disordered situations on specific dimensions exist either.The dramatic gap between teachers’ cognitive and practical status of cooperative learning task design pushes teachers to enhance consciousness of teaching objectives and prompt the correspondence between cooperative learning task types and the cooperative forms; focus on children’s and teacher’s common development and construct mutual benefit win-win relationship between teaching and learning; integrate the complex information,recognize and create an opportunity; integrate the analysis results of scientific basis and design high quality cooperative learning task;practice the quality evaluation of task design and optimize the quality of cooperative learning task.