Five Practices of Cooperative Learning

1. Form interdependent teams

Diverse groups of 5 or less that work together daily for 6-8 weeks after which new groups are formed.  

2. Set group goals

Share a team goal such as increasing the average score on a quiz that all students take individually after they help one another prepare. 

3. Ensure individual accountability.

Individual accountability means that to reach the team goal, all team members must master the targeted content or skills. Team success should depend on the hard work—and therefore the learning—of all members. This prevents the free rider and the know-it-all.  Teacher should not jump in and help too quickly. 

4. Teach communication and problem-solving skills.

Students need to learn about, practice, and refine key interpersonal skills.¹ 

-Active listening

-Explaining ideas and opinions

-Encouraging teammates  

-Completing tasks

5. Mix cooperative learning with other structures

Cooperative learning should be seen as a key part of each lesson, but not the whole lesson. 

Researchers have different but similar definitions of cooperative learning.  

Cooperative learning is the pedagogy within which students are active constructors of knowledge in the learning process instead of passive receivers of any given knowledge.

Three Types of Cooperative Learning

1. Informal cooperative learning - Cooperative grouping lasts from a few minutes to one class period, are short-term and ad-hoc groups in which students are required to work together to achieve a shared learning goal.
2. Cooperative based groups -Cooperative grouping that usually last a semester or an academic year, or even several years. They are long-term and heterogeneous learning groups with committed relationships, in which students support one another to complete assignments and make academic progress.
3. Formal cooperative learning groups -Cooperative grouping that lasts from one class period to several weeks. These are cooperative learning groups in which students work together to complete the learning tasks assigned and achieve shared learning goals.

Cooperative Groups Must Have ....

• Positive interdependence: members understand that they must learn together to accomplish the goal; they need each other for support, explanations, and guidance.
• Individual accountability: the performance of each group member is assessed against a standard, and members are held responsible for their contribution to achieving goals.
• Promotive interaction: students interact face-to-face and close together, not across the room.
• Group processing: groups reflect on their collaborative efforts and decide on ways to improve effectiveness.
• Development of small- group interpersonal skills: these skills, such as giving constructive feedback, reaching consensus, and involving every member, are necessary for effective group functioning. They must be taught and practiced before the groups tackle a learning task. 

Teacher should be facilitator of learning.

Theoretical perspectives

1. Social interdependence theory - Students help each other learn because they care about the group and its members, and come to derive self-identity benefits from group membership.  
2. Cognitive developmental perspective - Learners construct knowledge socially, based on their current or past knowledge, through social interaction rather than by observing it objectively.

3. Cognitive elaboration viewpoint - This viewpoint stresses the effectiveness of elaboration in the process of learning and thinking, and that elaboration prepares the individual for cognitive re-structure and rehearsal in order to enhance learning tasks.

4. Social learning theory - Learns can improve their knowledge and retention by observing and modeling the desired behaviors, attitudes and reactions of others, and that human thought processes are central to understanding personality.  

5. Constructivist learning theory - Knowledge is not achieved by learners but constructed through their interaction with the environment, to create their own meaningful knowledge.  Students are active in achieving their own knowledge. Teacher is facilitator.  In the process of learning, students actively develop and enlarge their knowledge through observation, reflection, experimentation, discovery and especially, social interaction. 

Constructivist vs. Traditional Learning

-constructing knowledge vs. receiving knowledge

-understanding and applying vs. retention

-analyzing vs. accumulating and memorizing

-dynamic vs. passive

Outcomes of Cooperative Learning

• Students expose inadequate reasoning which can then lead to better understanding.
• Through mutual feedback and debate, peers encourage one another to abandon  misconceptions and search for better solutions. 
• Peer communication can help a child master participation and argumentation, as well as verification and criticism.
• Collaboration between peers can provide a forum for discovery learning and encourage creative thinking.   
• Peer interaction can introduce children to the process of generating ideas.

Four Components Necessary for Modeling

-attention

-retention

-reproduction

-motivation

Four Features of Instruction for Cooperative Learning

• experience which most effectively implant a predisposition toward learning
• the ways in which a body of knowledge should be structured for understanding
• the most effective sequences in which to present the material to be learnednature of rewards and punishment in the process of learning

by Robert E. Slavin

Reviews evidence on the theories relating to learning outcomes of cooperative learning and presents evidence on the most widely used applications of cooperative methods.

Cooperative learning vary wild in their details.

THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES

1.  Motivational Perspective

Motivation is the single most important factor in the learning process.

2.  Social Cohesion Perspective

Social cohesiveness is the driving force behind successful cooperative grouping.

3.  Cognitive (Developmental) Perspective

Cooperative learning facilitates interaction among children on appropriate tasks which increases their mastery of critical concepts.

4. Cognitive (Elaboration) Perspective

Students take roles as recaller and listener - peer tutoring

All perspectives go hand in hand.

Strategy training and rewards are best for structuring group interaction.

COOPERATIVE LEARNING METHODS

Structured TEAM LEARNING

Student Team Learning

-team rewards

-individual opportunties

-individual accountability

-equal opportunities for success

FOUR METHODS OF TEAM LEARNING

A. Achievement Divisions

B. Games Tournament

C. Assisted Individualization

D. Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition

E. Peer Assisted Learning Strategies

F. IMPROVE

Informal Group Learning Methods

A. Jigsaw

B. Learning Together

C. Group Investigation

-group structure

-composition and task

-key role of teachers

Cooperative learning promotes positive social interactions and achievement.

Children can be taught to facilitate each other’s learning, help motivate underachieving children, improve interpersonal attitudes, and students’ communication skills. 

cooperative vs. competitive vs. individualistic learning

Group members working together as a team to attain group rewards are more successful than ad hoc groups where students are expected to work together but with few incentives to do so has little or no effect on learning.  

Key Elements of Successful Cooperative Learning

1. Establish a state of positive goal independence so group members understand that they are required to not only complete their part of the work but ti ensure that others do likewise.  
2. Group members understand that they are accountable for their contribution to the group.
3. Interpersonal and small group skills.

-actively listening to each other during discussions

-considering the other person’s idea and perspectives

-stating ideas clearly without making disparaging comments

-accepting responsibility for ones own behavior

-constructively critiquing the ideas of others

-sharing resources

-taking turns

4. Promotive interaction

5. Group processing involves members reflecting

Group Structure and Composition

Small groups of 4 or less are the most effective groupings, as well as mixed-ability groups rather than homogeneous. 

Type of Tasks

When students work on high-level cooperative tasks, they demonstrate higher-level reasoning and problem-solving discourse which positively effects the learning the occurs. 

Teacher’s Role in Cooperative Learning

Teachers must structure lessons that lend to cooperative group learning. Teachers must be facilitators. 

This article outlines a study to determine the usefulness of peer evaluations and whether or not a “free rider.” someone who does little or no work on team projects, effects the overall quality of group work.  This was done by requiring teams of students to write a set of three papers.  The students were grouped according to peer evaluations to determine who the “free riders” in the groups were.  One group had no “free riders,” while both of the others did. 

The results indicate that free riders do not depress the grades of non-free rider students. We also found that students’ peer evaluations do not correlate with their course performance, a finding which warrants further research.  However, using peer evaluations to grade “free riders” on their effort within the group was beneficial. 

Evaluating collaborative learning.

Some teachers argue that all group members should be assigned one grade. These teachers argue that in the workplace, teams are often rewarded for the quality of the project, and not for individual contributions to the project.  In addition, they argue that assigning one grade should motivate students to work together by creating “positive reward interdependence”  However, some evidence suggests that students easily become frustrated with group work when all group members earn the same grade regardless of effort.  This frustration can cause students to lose motivation and become disengaged from class activities.

Peer evaluations are an essential part of successful cooperative learning strategies and are useful for collecting feedback about team members’ specific behaviors. Another important question is whether the peer evaluations are valid and reliable.

Students who actively participate in teams reap educational benefits such as better assimilation of knowledge, higher test scores, and stronger leadership skills. 

One study suggests that important factors that may influence peer evaluations are a student’s age, race, and tendency to help others. It is also possible that someone’s attraction influences their evaluation. 

This is a study of the effectiveness of training teachers to use specific cognitive and metacognitive questions to challenge children’s thinking, problem solving and reasoning during cooperative learning in comparison to teachers who implement cooperative learning who have not participated in such training.  The study involved two groups of teachers, and two groups of students (3–4 person groups of mixed ability).

The results show that the teachers in the cooperative+questioning group used more challenging and scaffolding behaviors than the teachers in the cooperative only group. The study also shows that the children in the first group provided more elaborations, reasons, and justifications for their responses than their peers.

The Teacher’s Role in Promoting Discourse

There is no doubt that teachers need to explicitly teach children how to seek and provide help to each other if they are to reap the benefits widely attributed to social interaction during small group discussions. Teachers also need to be active during students’ small group discussions. This involves using a variety of strategies such as prompting students for supporting reasons, modeling the use of evidence, or challenging students with counter arguments More examples are: asking questions that challenged children to predict, identify, and generate potential solutions to group problems and were designed to encourage them to think more deeply and clearly about specific issues. 

Task Construction

The importance of the type of task the children are asked to undertake can stimulate discussion and learning. When students participate in tasks where there is a correct or right answer to obtain, such as occurs for computational or mathematics tasks, there is often little need to interact as the answer can be reached in well-structured ways. In contrast, open- and discovery-based tasks with no clear answer to the problem so students must share ideas and information if they are to resolve the problem at hand have the potential to encourage student interaction during small group discussions.