Cooperative learning and Web applications: a case study

Recent advances in the Internet technologies and in the World Wide Web can promote the cooperative learning (CL) that is a teaching strategy in which small teams, each composed by students of different levels of ability, use different learning activities to improve their understanding of a subject. This paper focuses on a study which analyses 45 high school students' cognitive abilities while are developing a database available online that contains the students evaluations, using cooperative learning and the "learning by doing" environment. The database has been protected with passwords to realise different level of priority to read (e.g, principal, school manager, parents and students). This project has been developed in the Laboratory of System and Techniques of Transmission (three hours in the week throughout the school year) in a High School in Italy, under the control of a professor of Universita della Svizzera Italiana (University of Lugano, Switzerland).