34 students (the majority of whom were female students) entered the assessment study and participated in the focus groups out of the 145 who took part in the project (Table 4). The participants were 21 years old on average, with a grade point average ranging from 19.14 to 13.62. This evaluation study's findings can be presented in three stages. Table 5 shows the emerging categories, with the details of the findings reported separately in each phase. It's important to note that the findings concentrated on the problems of adopting this teaching technique, followed by corrective measures at each level, as stated in the study's goal.
Phase 1:
During this step, the data collected from the interviews was analyzed and the following categories were identified:
Ineffective involvement: Because the instructional content was spread among the students in the home group, participants' experiences revealed that some kids were not accepting their fair share of responsibility and were unprepared. As a result of the lack of sufficient preparation, the topic was presented in an incomplete manner. This issue is viewed by students as a significant impediment to reaching educational goals in this teaching technique.
"Although there was a task for everyone in this technique, and they all had to complete it, some pupils did not do their jobs effectively, causing a difficulty for the entire group. They didn't take it seriously and showed up unprepared in class."
"Some of the students had not read the text before and entered the classroom, which made them not fluent in their own section, and they just came to read the text. This created a vacuum in the group”.
Inadequate teacher supervision: Because the entire teaching and learning process in this technique took place in groups, h and e, participants judged that inadequate teacher supervision had a detrimental impact on accomplishing learning goals. In other words, inadequate teacher monitoring resulted in ineffective technique implementation.
"Because the teacher was unaware of what was going on in the groups, the approach was not executed well in some of them, especially in the early sessions, when we were still getting to know each other, which was disconcerting. It would have been beneficial if the teacher had spent a few minutes with each group, for example, to observe what they were doing."
providing unneeded content: The incapacity of students to supply content that was consistent with educational goals was an issue that might be considered in the experiences of participants. This inconsistency could present itself in the form of omitting crucial topics or providing unneeded content.
"The content had to be prepared by us. We didn't know whether parts of the content were crucial and, in reality, comprised the main themes, and which were less so. As a result, occasionally the substance offered was uninteresting, and, of course, some crucial issues were presented wrongly”.
Ineffective communication: Participants had a negative experience dealing with the teacher and considered that this had an impact on the method's quality of execution.
"We had never seen the teacher before, and the manner was unfamiliar, so everything appeared to be complex. We couldn't always develop the essential dialogue and involvement in the classroom, which made us feel bad and scared".
Intra-group communication challenges: Because of the communication that existed between students prior to the introduction of the approach, the teacher's establishment of default groups was accompanied by complaints from the participants at random. The pupils believed they couldn't communicate with their peers, which contributed to the method's failure to achieve its objectives.
“The ties that students already formed with one another in the group sometimes had a negative impact on their productivity. For example, some of them already had issues with one another and did not enjoy working together, which harmed their job. I believe it is more preferable to allow pupils to form their own groups”.
Lack of a final ending: One of the participants' common impressions was that the concepts in each session lacked a final conclusion. There was no methodology for summarizing and closing the educational concept in each session according to the original model of the puzzle technique, and this issue caused students to have difficulty concluding the educational concept in each session.
"As if there was an empty space in our heads, we couldn't figure out how the session would conclude." We needed the teacher to give us a conclusion at the end of the session and to clarify the areas that we were having difficulty understanding. This, however, did not occur. At the end of each lecture session, we are given the opportunity to ask questions”.
Phase 2
Following the revisions and implementation of the model, a second evaluation was conducted using focused interviews with students. Some of the issues from the previous phase, such as the lack of a definite conclusion and the content's inconsistency with educational goals, were resolved, while others remained. The following themes emerged from this phase's analysis:
Ineffective involvement: The interviewers still faced a severe issue in not taking the session and instructional approaches seriously. The learning process was hampered by certain students' unwillingness to participate in group work and their lack of collaboration in supplying content.
Group heterogeneity: Although the problems of intra-group communication amongst students were reduced at this stage, the issue of group members' educational level heterogeneity was mentioned as one of the challenges.
"The situation among the groups was different. For example, because the group members were chosen from the classroom list, one group was made up entirely of smart students, while the other was made up entirely of non-smart children. It was preferable to have smart, average, and weak pupils in each group."
Crowded classrooms: Because there were more people in the school at this era, crowding classrooms was another issue that was added to the issues. Putting a large number of pupils in small groups in a short space generated overcrowding and disturbed the learning process. This issue did not arise in the first phase since there were fewer studs in the first phase.
"Our class had a total of 53 students. Assume we were in groups of six or seven, and when these groups began to converse, the classroom became extremely noisy, which bothered us much. We couldn't always hear each other."
Piece learning: Students' objections regarding a portion of each teaching session's material arose as a new difficulty in this phase, leading to revisions in the third phase. In reality, pupils simply learned the topics that they needed to prepare for. They didn't learn the rest of the material for a variety of reasons, including other group members' incapacity to convey the points, and their own lack of readiness to express it.
"When you sit in a lecture-style classroom, you hear everything the teacher has to say, but with this method, I just learned what I had prepared. However, I was having trouble understanding the bits that other students were presenting, which scared me that the exam would be difficult."
Phase 3
Other improvements in the implementation of the teaching approach were made as a result of the second phase's analysis of assessment data. The third phase evaluation was conducted through focus group interviews with learners after the model was re-implemented, following the changes made to weak points discovered in the second phase. Many of the difficulties that teachers face were addressed. However, several aspects remained a challenge, such as ineffective involvement. Given that this was the study's final phase, the key points extracted from student interviews after implementing three phases of the method and making corrections, such as teaching through peers, creating a dynamic and appealing classroom, and establishing new interactions between students, were introduced as positive features of the proposed method.