Effect of Individual and Group Works on Students’ Success in Adidactical Situations

Abstract

One of the theories in didactical research is Guy Brousseau’s (1998) Theory of Didactical Situations in Mathematics (TDSM) that investigates how learning occurs. TDSM, which intends to understand, interpret and improve teaching and learning activities, defines three different learning situations. One of these situations is adidactical situation emphasizing learning of students as a result of their interaction with a Milieu. The aim of this study is to compare student achievement in adidactical situation designed as individual work with those designed as group work. To this end, an adidactical situation was designed to form the area formulas for parallelogram and trapezoid. The study was conducted with 60 students of 7th grade. Data was gathered by academic achievement test, observation and semi-structured interviews. Mixed methods research design was utilized. Descriptive analysis was used for the analysis of the qualitative data, and Mann Whitney U - Test was used for the analysis of the quantitative data. Results of the study shows that the students working individually in adidactical situations are more successful than the students working in group in adidactical situations.