PUTTING TOGETHER PIECES OF THE PUZZLE: STUDENT LEARNING IN JIGSAW ACTIVITIES

Jigsaw activities are designed for individuals to first work in groups to become “experts” in a given topic and then move to mixed groups where they teach their peers about their topic and learn from their peers about the other topics. An example jigsaw activity has students first work in small groups to learn and interpret one of three types of volcano monitoring data (earthquake epicenters, seismic RSAM, or GPS data), then are reorganized into mixed groups to teach and learn about all three data types and work as an interdisciplinary team to assess the emerging magmatic activity. Such activities are used to engage students in an active approach to learning, but how effective is student learning? Do students learn all content areas effectively? Are they able to teach their “expert” topic to their peers? We have implemented jigsaw activities into introductory and upper division majors courses to test for differences in student learning of topics and self-efficacy in “expert” (original) groups, as non-experts (mixed groups) and as a function of surface and deeper learning gains. Jigsaw activities focused on forecasting volcanic activity (intro and majors), hurricanes (intro only) and societal uses of mineral resources (majors).

Pre- and post-activity learning data for all activities indicates that students learned the expert information and effectively taught it to their peers. Students self-efficacy scores increased across all activities on their knowledge about the assigned topic. Expert scores and non-expert scores are within 3-11% for surface learning questions (e.g., recall) and within 3-19% for deeper learning questions. In some cases, non-experts outperform experts. Learning by majors compared to intro students using the same volcano monitoring activity was better in both types of questions, and show that majors start with a greater schema, and have deeper learning gains than introductory students. Our research indicates that students do learn from jigsaw activities, but the depth of learning varies across populations, which conveys a) the efficacy of expert group discussions b) the importance of structuring jigsaw activities to fully support experts in teaching their topic to their peers and c) deeper learning through application/analysis questions may require more time or scaffolding for novice students.