The Effectiveness of Using the Cooperative Learning Strategy in Acquiring Some Concepts and Skills Related to the Subject of Textile Science among Students of Home Economics

Cooperative learning is a learning method which requires students to work in small groups to solve a problem, to complete certain task, or to achieve a goal that has already been defined (Magdy Aziz: 2004).
    It is a successful teaching strategy in which small groups are used. Each group includes students with different levels of abilities, who engage in a variety of learning activities to improve understanding of the topic to be studied, and each member of the team is not only responsible for learning what he has to learn, but he also has to help his colleagues in the group to learn, thus creating an atmosphere of achievement and pleasure during learning (Stephen 1992).
    Therefore, the title of the research was chosen as “The effectiveness of using the cooperative learning strategy in acquiring some concepts and skills related to the subject of textile science among students of home economics”.
The problem of research is to answer the following questions:
1. How effective is the use of the cooperative learning strategy in developing the cognitive aspect of the textile science?
2. How effective is the use of the cooperative learning strategy in developing the skill performance related to the textile science?
3. What are the students’ opinions about the learning strategy used?
The research aims to:
• Use cooperative learning to acquire knowledge and develop skill performance in the textile science subject.
• Measure the effectiveness of the use of the cooperative learning strategy in the development of the cognitive aspect of the textile science. 
• Measure the effectiveness of the use of cooperative learning strategy in the development of skill performance related to the textile science. 
• Activate students’ use of the cooperative learning strategy.


The Research Tools:

An achievement test (pre-, post) to measure the cognitive aspect.
A practical test (applied) (pre-, post) to measure the skill performance.
An observation card to measure the technical aspects of performance.
A form to measure students’ views towards cooperative learning.

The research was conducted on (24) students in the second year students, Faculty of Home Economics, Department of House and Establishments Management, Menoufia University in the first term, in the academic year (2016/2017), on a unit of the course of textile science