DEVELOPING STUDENTS' LOGICAL REASONING SKILLS BY COOPERATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING

Logical reasoning skills are important for a successful mathematical learning, as pupils need these skills for explaining their solution. Thus skills are essential for a primary school teacher, because they need to explain solving methods and solutions to their pupils and they have to teach them to write down their explanations. This paper presents a research on the effect of cooperative problems solving for developing pre-service primary school teachers' logical reasoning skills. The sample was made of Preschool and Primary School Pedagogy specialization students from Babes-Bolyai University. These students were grouped in experimental and control group. Each group was tested twice: before the experiment and after the experiment. In the experimental group the researcher was used collaborative working methods for solving problems; in the other group the problems were solved using individual work, then discussing the solution frontally on the blackboard. The results show that the experimental group had a slightly better development in their logical reasoning skills.