Effectiveness of Jigsaw Strategy on Students Achievement in Engineering Education

Abstract

Outcome-Based Education (OBE) is an educational theory that bases each part of an educational system around goals (outcomes). OBE is playing a great role in engineering education, the world over and in traditional educational settings as well as in continuing education. It is a student-centric teaching and learning process in which it deals with the planning, course delivery, and students’ assessment to achieve stated outcomes. A number of classroom assessment techniques (CAT) or active learning tools like think-pair-share, flipped classroom, problem based learning (PBL), and cooperative learning techniques such as jigsaw are used for achieving effective learning of the students. The jigsaw technique is one of the active learning techniques which has proved to be an effective method for classroom teaching and hence it is widely used for teaching engineering courses. The present paper focuses on the use of ‘jigsaw technique’ for teaching the course ‘Biology for Engineers’, a core course of B. Tech. program, to study students’ performance in the End Semester Examination. The course content is difficult to get understood by the engineering students. Therefore, some difficult concept from this course is taught by using jigsaw technique. The students were divided into 8 groups with 8 students in each group. All the groups were assigned a topic with eight different subtopics for study and the jigsaw technique was implemented. The results of study indicated that the use of jigsaw technique improves students’ performance by 15% and helps them in developing their lifelong learning skills.