THE EFFECTIVENESS OF COLLABORATIVE LEARNING STRATEGIES IN TEACHING PHYSICS: A CASE STUDY OF HADJI BUTU SCHOOL OF ARTS AND TRADES

This research investigates the effectiveness of collaborative learning strategies in teaching Physics to senior high school students at the Hadji Butu School of Arts and Trades (HBSAT). Collaborative learning has been widely recognized as a potential educational approach in the 21st century education, mainly in enhancing the academic performance of the students in Physics. Hence, this study employs a descriptive research design and uses stratified random sampling to gather data from 77 Grade 12 students at Hadji Butu School of Arts and Trades-Senior High School. Furthermore, the results unfold a strong preference for collaborative strategies, such as group work and problem-based learning among students. These strategies have found positively influenced their conceptual understanding and problem-solving skills as evidenced by their satisfactory academic performance in Physics. The key findings indicate that students had a generally positive attitude towards collaborative learning, with a grand mean score of 3.31 which indicates that strong agreement on the collaboration. The study also found that the average Physics grade of students was 85.42 and it emphasizes a good level of performance. Additionally, the strong correlation was found between the effectiveness of the collaborative learning strategies employed and the students’ problem-solving skills (0.89), further explained that these strategies foster strong correlation to the level of academic performance of students in the Physics subject. This means that, the effectiveness of learning strategies increases, physics grade of the student also increases. Importantly, the research revealed very weak correlations between students' attitudes of collaborative strategies and their academic performance in Physics. Specifically, the Pearson correlation analysis demonstrated not significant correlation (002) between students’ attitude towards collaborative learning strategies and student performance levels. This suggests that the analysis does not provide enough evidence to suggest that student attitudes towards collaborative learning have any meaningful impact on their physics grades.