Team Learning: A Pilot Study

Teachers must put effort, creativity, and ingenuity into the science classroom and curriculum in order to ensure the material will remain fresh and interesting for the students and for themselves. In one case an organic chemistry teacher used a “Team Learning” method in order to keep the material stimulating for his students and to overcome some of the difficulties teachers face (Dinan & Frydrychowski, 1995). This experiment in new curriculum involved using teams over the course of a semester to teach the required material. Dinan and Frydrychowski (1995) found that this method seemed to increase the effectiveness of learning and student interest in the subject. Other results showed students were arriving earlier for classes, and that students were missing fewer classes over all. While Dinan and Frydrychowski’s (1995) study shows the team learning method to work well at the college level, there is no research to show if it would work well at the high school level. As a result the researcher chose to do a pilot study in this area to determine if the use of this method would have any positive effects at the high school level and if further research was warranted