The effects of problem-solving strategies on students' achievement, on the cooperative learning groups in physics teaching

In physics education, the improvement of scientific thought skill is one of the major targets. While reaching this aim, the chosen teaching methods can be different; however it is very prominent that the ability to discriminate problems by using intuitive knowledge, to have creative thought for problem-solving and to establish a relation between the cases are acquired by individuals. In information age, creative and prolific individuals who know how to reach new information who can select the best one among them are needed. At this research, experimental procedures were carried out on the second year upper secondary school students who attended a lower socio-economic status secondary school at fall semester of 2005-2006 academic year in lzmir. In this study, strategy teaching group consisted of 25 and control group contained 21 students. Research data were collected by Physics Achievement Test, The Scale of Problem-Solving Strategies and problem solving sheets. During this study, cooperative problem-solving strategies were used with the experiment group (the strategy teaching group) and the control group was instructed problem solving-strategies with traditional teaching methods. In conclusion, the fact that the average of strategy teaching groups' achievement and problem solving is much more higher than control groups' achievement was found