Using the Jigsaw Method for Meaningful Learning to Enhance Learning and Rentention in an Educational Leadership Graduate School Course
This qualitative case study examined factors that were both successful and unsuccessful along with the attitudes and preferences of educational leadership graduate students towards working in an online cooperative jigsaw blog project, in which each student had an active role for each topic addressed throughout the semester. The theoretical framework for this study was based on the work of Novak (2011) and Ausubel (1960). Their theories explore how the learner processes large amounts of meaningful material from verbal and textual formats in classroom settings. Analysis of the online questionnaire and face-to-face interview data indicated that the graduate students enrolled in the course effectively learn when they are learning collaboratively, in smaller chunks of information at a time,as subject matter experts and have an ease of access to the learning materials. Students also preferred non-traditional methods over traditional lectures, and become more involved when they participate in the evaluation of their peers. Results also revealed that students disliked learning using the jigsaw method when there were missing pieces to the blog postings, a lack of quality in the postings, a lack of accuracy, a repetition of information in the blog and a lack of peer and instructor feedback.
