Investigation of the Impacts of the Leaning Community Program on Students’ Learning

Abstract

The purpose of the study aimed to investigate the impacts of the SDPP (Students’ Dialogue Praxis Program) on students’ learning. SDPP was based on the perspectives and strategies of learning community (LC) advocated by Manabu Sato and LC related studies. The core concepts of SDPP included the dialogues with teaching materials, with the peers, and with oneself and majorly included three kinds of learning activities, learning by doing, collaborative learning, and reflective learning. The participants consisted of 106 eight graders from the same junior high school located in central Taiwan. Of 106 participants, 53 students who were the experimental group attending SDPP and 53 students who were the control group not taking any such intervention program. Results found that the experimental group acquired the scores from the communications survey, learning attitude survey, and critical thinking survey significantly higher than those of the control group. The study confirmed that SDPP made remarkable positive impacts on students’ communicative capability, learning attitude, and critical thinking ability. Based on the findings, the suggestions for the teachers were also made in this study.