must get to know and trust each other, communicate accurately and unambiguously, accept and support each other and resolve conflict constructively.
Besides teaching social skills, teachers need to teach students ‘Quiet Signal’ which was introduced by Kagan 1992 because from the findings, students tend to get
over-excited and thus create a very noisy atmosphere. Hence, the quiet signal is an appropriate signal for students to stop talking and to give their full attention to the teacher.
It works well in a classroom. When the teacher raises hisher hand, the students do the same action to give full attention to the teacher Kagan, 1992.
Moreover, cooperative learning could be implemented for different types of students. Students with special needs might need different strategies to keep them on
track. In this research, there were students who preferred to work alone. For this type of students, teachers could give them positive reinforcement for completing a given task.
For students who cannot get along, teachers can keep cooperative group activities brief and simple while they are working in groups. They are led to focus on improving their
social skills Ellis Whalen, 35-37, 1992.
Furthermore, the cooperative learning strategy should be continued as a teaching method to enhance the social communication among the students in the group. It offers
the secondary school students the chance to develop positive, productive relationships among themselves. Cooperative teams may offer some students the academic support that
will help them to excel in their studies.
5.4 Suggestions for Further Research
As mentioned earlier, the limitation of this study was the small size of sample.
Additional research should be conducted to examine whether these results are positive in a large sample in all forms, all disciplines, in urban, in rural, in suburban schools, and for
high, average, and low achievers.
Besides this, it may be interesting to do further research into whether cooperative learning promotes better retention of knowledge gained after the teaching. For better
results, the teacher could give a post test one month after the implementation of cooperative learning strategy.
Last but not least, comparative studies could be done to identify the difference between the cooperative learning strategy and other learning strategies such as problem
based learning or content based learning. Further research is recommended to verify the findings of the current study in order to strengthen this contribution towards the
development of a sound research data, based on cooperative learning strategy.
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