<実践報告> 初年次教育における協調学習が及ぼす効果とそのプロセス - 学生同士の〈足場づくり〉を中心に

Abstract

The First Year Experience is an educational program used to address various problems that students have when they enter school caused by moving from high school into university education, and it has been organizationally introduced in many universities recently. Amid such rapid trends in educational reform, a challenge that arises after introducing such a reform is to evaluate and examine how the approach affects students' learning and whether the First Year Experience is really effective. This paper discusses a field test of a First Year Experience class based on collaborative education, which is effective for developing various abilities. A design experiment was used as a model where evaluation and examination function with faculty development (FD), and the students' learning process was thoroughly examined using a methodology combining both qualitative and quantitative data. As a result, the following two aspects were clarified: 1) In terms of grouping in collaborative learning, it has been proved that mutual cooperation is more often observed in cases where students with different capability levels are grouped together, and that both types of students—those who help and those are helped—obtain different quality of learning; 2) In addition to conventional characteristics in collaborative learning where students teach and learn mutual contents from each other, the situation has appeared where high-capability students support others receiving scaffolding who have not been able to exercise his or her capabilities yet. Although scaffolding is generally provided by a teacher in the learning environment, in cases where students receive scaffolding on their own, the tendency has arisen of not educational but social meaning with sustained effects, and that students activities become more active through further use of scaffolding.