Student Team Achievement Division (STAD) is a Cooperative learning

Cooperative learning

Cooperative learning is an approach to organizing classroom activities into academic and social learning experiences. Students must work in groups to complete tasks collectively...

strategy in which small groups of learners with different levels of ability work together to accomplish a shared learning goal. It was devised by Slavin and his associates at Johns Hopkins University.

In STAD, students are assigned to 4 or 5-member heterogeneous groups. Once these assignments are made, a four-step cycle is initiated: (i) teach, (ii) team study, (iii) test and (iv) recognition.

Teach

In the teaching stage, the teacher presents materials usually in a lecture-discussion format. Students should be told what it is they are going to learn and why it is important.

Team study

In the team study stage, group members work cooperatively with teacher-provided worksheets and answer sheets.

Test

In the testing stage, each student individually takes a quiz. The teacher grades the quiz and notes the current scores as well as the improvement over previous quizzes.

Recognition

Each team receives recognition awards depending on the average scores of each team. For example, teams that average 15 to 19 improvement points receive a GOOD TEAM certificate, teams that average 20 to 24 improvement points receive a GREAT TEAM certificate, and teams that average 25 to 30 improvement points receive a SUPER TEAM certificate.

External links

• STAD as an active learning strategy: Empirical eviden ce from mathematics classroom http://www.lit.az/ijar/pdf/jes/4/JES2010(4-2).pdf