The application of the Jigsaw cooperative learning technique in mapping concepts of nuclear radiation in diagnosis and therapy

Physics for medical students is perceived as a sophisticated subject. The sophistication, however, does not lie in the physics concepts themselves or students’ comprehension of the subject, but it is more often related to the ineffectiveness of techniques applied to teach the subject. This study investigates the effect of the Jigsaw technique, a highly structured form of cooperative learning, on the academic achievement of first-year medical students in learning physics. A quasi-experimental research approach with a pretest-posttest design was employed to conduct the study with a purposive randomly selected sample of fifty students made up of twenty-five students in the control group and twenty-five students in the experimental group. The control group was taught using traditional lectures, while the experimental group was taught using the Jigsaw technique which involved students working actively to map the concepts of nuclear radiation in diagnosis and therapy. A comprehensive statistical analysis, which included a Shapiro’s test, paired sample t-test, independent sample t-test, average gain factor, and size effect calculations, was used to test the research hypotheses. The findings of this study showed that there was a statistically significant difference (P < 0.05) between the post-test scores of students exposed to the Jigsaw cooperative learning technique and those who were not. In addition, it was deduced by the educator (first author) that the students were actively engaged with the topic material, took more responsibility for their performance in the activity, learned how to map the radiation physics concepts, and explored a new learning environment that enabled them to use their higher-order thinking skills to solve medical physics problems.