Nurturance Effects of the New Cognitive Style-Based Learning Strategy in Science Learning

摘要

This research is the field trial stage of research and development of the new cognitive-based learning strategy called @UnESa-GAIn. Basically, this learning strategy is designed for students in concrete cognitive development to improve mainly instructional effects of conceptual understanding, problem-solving ability, and process skills. This study aims to investigate the nurturance effects of the learning strategy as social skills and character traits. The observed social skills consist of communicating effectively, listening to others, respecting the opinions of others, working together, and contributing ideas, while the observed character traits include meticulous, honest, and responsible. This study was conducted in two elementary schools in different location namely SDN Pasar Lama 1 and SDN Pasar Lama 3 Banjarmasin Indonesia involving 72 students. By implementing one shoot case study along ten times classroom meetings, it is found that the nurturance effects of the learning strategy both the social skills and character traits have reached a good category. They tend to increase along the classroom meetings. The social skills and character traits that still need to be improved especially in SDN Pasar Lama 1 are listening to the others and being honest respectively. Students with field independence (FI) cognitive styles tend to achieve better nurturance effects than field dependence (FD) cognitive styles. This finding is an anomaly because generally, FD students tend to prefer social activities and have better social skills than FI students. It is suggested that to accomplish the good social skills, the learning strategy has to be implemented in a collaborative approach. The new strategy gives a wide contribution toin-depth learning early to achieve instructional as well as nurturance effects of learning by considering individual differences.