Third, the task students work together on must be clearly defined. The cooperative and collaborative learning techniques presented here should help make this possible for teachers. For more detailed descriptions of cooperative and collaborative learning, check out the books, articles, and Web sites listed on our Resources page. Welcome to Cooperative and Collaborative Learning. In this session we'll focus specifically on how this technique for using small, cooperative groups in education can help improve learning in your class.
How do cooperative and collaborative learning differ from the traditional approach? How have cooperative and collaborative learning developed since they became popular? What are the benefits of cooperative and collaborative learning? During direct teaching the instructor needs to ensure that students do the intellectual work of explaining what they are learning, conceptually organizing the material, summarizing it, and integrating it into existing conceptual frameworks.
Cooperative base groups are long-term, heterogeneous cooperative learning groups with stable membership in which students provide one another with support, encouragement, and assistance to make academic progress by attending class, completing assignments, learning assigned material [ 1 ].
The use of base groups tends to improve attendance, personalizes the work required and the school experience, and improves the quality and quantity of learning. Base groups have permanent membership and provide the long-term caring peer relationships necessary to help students developed in healthy ways cognitively and socially as well as influence members to exert effort in striving to achieve.
Base groups formally meet to provide help and assistance to each other, verify that each member is completing assignments and progressing satisfactory through the academic program, and discuss the academic progress of each member. It is especially important to have base groups in large classes or schools and when the subject matter is complex and difficult. Constructive controversy involves the discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of proposed actions aimed at synthesizing novel and creative solutions.
It also involves dissent and argumentation [ 20 ]. Dissent may be defined as differing in opinion or conclusion, especially from the majority. Argumentation is a social process in which two or more individuals engage in a dialog where arguments are constructed, presented, and critiqued. The theory underlying constructive controversy states that the way conflict is structured within situations determines how individuals interact with each other, which in turn determines the quality of the outcomes [ 12 , 19 ].
Intellectual conflict maybe structured along a continuum, with concurrence seeking at one end and constructive controversy at the other. The process of concurrence seeking involves avoiding open disagreement to conform to the majority opinion and reach a public consensus. The process of controversy involves utilizing the conflict among positions to achieve a synthesis or a creative integration of the various positions. The outcomes generated by the process of controversy tend to include higher quality decision making and achievement, greater creativity, higher cognitive and moral reasoning, greater motivation to improve understanding, more positive relationships and social support, and more democratic values.
The conditions mediating the effects of the controversy process include a cooperative context, heterogeneity among members, skilled disagreement, and rational argument. When used in combination, cooperative formal, informal, base groups, and constructive controversy provide an overall structure for school learning.
Cooperative efforts result in numerous outcomes that may be subsumed into three broad categories: effort to achieve, positive interpersonal relationships, and psychological adjustment.
The social interdependence research has considerable generalizability as a research participants have varied as to economic class, age, gender, and culture, b research tasks and measures of the dependent variables have varied widely, and c many different researchers with markedly different orientations working in different settings and in different decades have conducted the studies.
We now have over studies on cooperative, competitive, and individualistic efforts from which we can derive effect sizes. This is far more evidence than exists for most other aspects of human interaction. Cooperating to achieve a common goal results in higher achievement and greater productivity compared to competitive or individualistic efforts [ 10 , 13 , 19 ].
There is so much research that confirms this finding that it stands as one of the strongest principles of social and organizational psychology. Cooperation also resulted in more frequent generation of new ideas and solutions i. The superiority of cooperative efforts as compared to competitive and individualistic efforts increased as the task became more conceptual, the more higher-level reasoning and critical thinking was required, the more desired was problem solving, the more creativity was desired, the more long-term retention was required, and the greater the need for application of what was learned.
More positive and committed relationships develop in cooperative than in competitive or individualistic situations [ 10 , 13 , 19 ]. This is true when individuals are homogeneous.
It is also true when individuals differ in ethnic membership, intellectual ability, handicapping conditions, culture, social class, and gender. Cooperative learning tends to be essential for classes with diverse students from different ethnic groups and handicapping conditions [ 10 ].
Cooperating on a task, compared to competing or working individualistically, also results in more task-oriented and personal social support.
Working cooperatively with peers, and valuing cooperation, results in greater psychological health and higher self-esteem than does competing with peers or working independently [ 10 , 13 ]. The more students cooperate with each other, the higher tends to be their self-esteem, productivity, acceptance and support of classmates, and autonomy and independence.
Working cooperatively with peers is not a luxury. Five basic elements for designing cooperative learning lessons have been derived from Social Interdependence theory and Structure-Process-Outcome theory and the research on social interdependence. The five basic elements that are required in any cooperative learning lesson are: positive interdependence, individual accountability, promotive interaction, social skills, and group processing.
Positive interdependence is the heart of cooperative efforts. Positive interdependence among students must be structured into the lesson for it to be cooperative.
While every lesson must contain positive goal interdependence, positive interdependence may also be structured through mutual rewards, distributed resources, complementary roles, a mutual identity, and other methods of structuring positive interdependence. Individual accountability exists when the performance of each individual student is assessed and the results are given back as feedback to the group and the individual [ 10 ].
A purpose of cooperative learning is to make each group member a stronger individual. There is considerable group-to-individual transfer. Students learn together so that they can subsequently perform higher as individuals.
Individual accountability may be structured by a observing students as they work together and documenting the contributions of each member, b having each student explain what they have learned to a classmate, or c giving an individual test to each student. Contributing to the success of a cooperative effort requires interpersonal and small group skills.
In cooperative learning groups, students are expected to use social skills appropriately [ 10 ]. Leadership, trust-building, communication, decision-making, and conflict-management skills have to be taught just as purposefully and precisely as academic skills.
How to teach students social skills is the focus of Johnson [ 21 ] and Johnson and Johnson [ 20 ]. Finally, students need to engage in group processing. They enable instructors to a structure for cooperative learning any lesson in any subject area with any set of curriculum materials, b fine-tune and adapt cooperative learning to their specific students, needs, and circumstances, and c intervene in malfunctioning groups to improve their effectiveness.
These five essential elements allow instructors to structure any lesson for student activeness and engagement. It is only when these five aspects are carefully structured in a lesson that the lesson becomes truly cooperative and students become active and engaged.
Characteristics of active learning are that students engage in dialogs, interact with classmates in small groups, generate new ideas and cognitive structures within the groups, and coordinate with groupmates as to the direction and speed of the work.
Active learning typically requires a learning partner or a small group in which the information being learned is analyzed, synthesizes, evaluated during discussions. In a discussion, students construct new cognitive structures or access their existing ones to subsume the new information and experiences. What does increase motivation and achievement is cooperative learning. In cooperative learning lessons, students are assigned to small groups usually two, three, or four members and given an assignment to complete such as solving a problem or mastering a set of procedures.
Working cooperatively with classmates to solve a problem is far more effective than competing with classmates or working by oneself to solve the problem. Find out more about collaborative learning as a pedagogical model for primary schools. Like the cast and crew of a theatre production, co-operation involves interdependence.
Roles and responsibilities are clearly defined but are open for negotiation. This method of collaboration brings with it a strong sense of accountability. In contrast to collaborative learning, a cooperative learning structure takes the following form:.
Discover the tools and priorities for a streamlined approach to staff and student needs. The majority of students learn best when they are immersed in learning, through interaction and application. A student is more likely to remember something discovered through active participation and peer work than through the passive acceptance of information presented by the teacher. Despite the benefits, effective cooperative and collaborative learning does not necessarily come easy and may require a change of mindset for everyone involved.
The world is already collaborating, and by using both cooperative and collaborative methods, teachers can help to create well-rounded citizens with the skills needed to succeed — not only in further education and work — but also their personal lives.
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