Maximizing instruction through cooperative learning

Research

shows that students

learn more by cooperating than they do by competing or working individually. Here's how you can incorporate cooperative experiences

into your classroom.

The late scholar Ernest Boyer divided the history of U.S. higher education into three distinct yet overlapping phases. The first of these phases dates back to colonial times when educators considered teaching to be a sacred calling, on par with the ministry. In most cases their mission was to prepare students to become civic or religious leaders, and consequently, they assumed responsibility for students' intellectual, moral, and spiritual development. Around the mid-1800s however, perceptions about higher education's purpose changed. The growing nation needed service-oriented patriots to manage efficient factories, improve agricultural productivity, and serve in government, and so it turned to its universities to produce both them and the practical knowledge that would shape its future. This attitude change ushered in the second phase of higher education wherein professors juggled teaching with conducting applied research in a variety of areas such as agriculture, manufacturing, and civics. By the early 1900s, however, higher education's mission had been redefined a third time. In this phase universities sought to fuel human progress by advancing pure knowledge. Educators focused on pursuing such knowledge through basic research rather than on training students. Teaching had become the poor cousin, and most academicians believed that anyone who knew enough about a field to have acquired a doctorate in it could teach it.

A particular teaching paradigm dominated this third phase of higher education. Based on philosopher John Locke's theory of the tabula rasa, this paradigm likens the minds of untrained students to empty, passive vessels awaiting the transfer of knowledge. Under this model, teaching consists of nothing more than educators pouring their knowledge (in an impersonal way) into students, whom they then classify, sort, and categorize on the basis of how they perform in an academic competition for grades.

Today, however, we are witnessing a quiet revolution at colleges and universities across the United States. Although research remains a top priority, many professors are placing a renewed emphasis on teaching quality. They no longer see their students as empty or passive vessels but as active constructors, discoverers, and transformers of knowledge. These professors want to develop students' talents and abilities so that they can function in real-world professional environments. And perhaps most importantly, these educators recognize that to do so they must try to create learning situations that encourage students to become actively involved.

Cooperative learning is one of the key components of this new approach. It is a pedagogical technique that involves students working together in small groups to accomplish shared learning goals and to maximize their own and each other's learning. To appreciate this technique and understand how to use it, educators need to grasp three things. First, the reasons why cooperative learning is important. Second, what basic elements mediate its effectiveness. And lastly, the mechanics of how to structure cooperative learning in the college classroom.

Why Use Cooperative Learning?

The research on the use of cooperative learning at the college level has focused on three broad categories of outcomes: individual achievement, positive interpersonal relationships, and psychological health. Because each outcome can induce the others, they are likely to be found together.

Since 1924, more than 168 studies have compared the relative efficacy of cooperative, competitive (where students work against each other), and individualistic (where students work alone) learning on the individual achievement of students 18 years or older. The results of these studies show that cooperative learning promotes a significantly higher level of individual achievement than either competitive (effect size = 0.49) or individualistic (effect size = 0.53) learning. These results hold for verbal tasks (such as reading, writing, and orally presenting), mathematical tasks, and procedural tasks (such as swimming, golf, and tennis).

In addition to promoting meaningful increases in achievement, cooperative learning also seems to encourage the development of positive relationships. Such relationships play a distinct part in creating a true learning community on a college campus, building friendships among diverse groups of people, and retaining students until graduation. Meta-analysis of the research shows that cooperative learning promotes greater camaraderie among students than either competitive (effect size = 0.68) or individualistic work (effect size = 0.55). Moreover, 24 studies that focused exclusively on social support reveal that college students learning cooperatively perceive that they are getting more support (both academic and personal) from peers and instructors than students who work either competitively (effect size = 0.60) or individualistically (effect size = 0.51). On the whole, it seems that students who work cooperatively to complete assignments, even when they come from different ethnic, cultural, linguistic, social class, ability, and gender groups, develop positive, supportive ways of interacting.

Several studies measuring the direct relationship between social interdependence and psychological health in a wide variety of college-age populations demonstrate that cooperative learning also correlates highly with a number of indices of psychological health. For instance, research on self-esteem, one of the most important aspects of psychological health, has found that cooperative efforts promote higher self-esteem than competitive (effect size = 0.47) or individualistic (effect size = 0.29) efforts. Members of cooperative learning groups also tend to be more socially skilled than students who work competitively or individualistically.

In 1997, Leonard Springer, Elizabeth Stanne, and Samuel Donovan conducted a meta-analysis of studies of small-group (predominantly cooperative) learning in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology (SMET) disciplines. (Their search of the literature produced 383 reports related to small-group learning in postsecondary SMET from 1980 or later, 39 of which met the rigorous inclusion criteria for meta-analysis.) That analysis shows that small-group learning had a significant and positive effect on undergraduates' achievement, persistence, and attitudes. Mean effect sizes for achievement, persistence, and attitudes were 0.51, 0.46, and 0.55, respectively. The researchers found that the 0.51 effect of small-group learning on achievement would move a student from the 50th percentile to the 70th percentile on a standardized test. Further, the 0.46 effect on persistence would be enough to reduce attrition in SMET courses and programs by 22 percent.

The Five Basic Elements of Cooperative Learning

James Watson, who won a Nobel Prize with collaborator Francis Crick for discovering the double helix DNA molecule, once said that nothing new that is really interesting comes without collaboration. Teachers who simply place students in groups and tell them to work together, however, will often find that they do not always get beneficial results. The fact is, not every group situation facilitates true cooperative learning. Five basic elements differentiate true cooperative learning arrangements from other instructional small groups.

1. Positive Interdependence. This first element lies at the very heart of cooperative learning. In a true cooperative learning group, each student believes that he or she cannot succeed unless the other group members do (and vice versa) and that their group mates' work benefits them just as their work benefits the others. Thus to be truly cooperative, a lesson must have either mutual learning goals or positive goal interdependence (e.g., group members learn the assigned material and make sure that everyone else has done the same) built into it. Professors can strengthen positive interdependence within a group in several ways. They can

* add joint rewards (e.g., if all members of a group score 90 percent or better on the test, each will receive five bonus points)

* divide resources (e.g., give each group member a part of the total information required to complete an assignment)

* assign group members complementary roles (i.e., reader, checker, and encourager).

2. Individual Accountability. This element comes into play when educators assess individual students' performance and give feedback to them and the other group members. To function cooperatively, a group needs to know which of its members needs more assistance, support, and encouragement to complete assignments. Yet, each student also must understand that he or she cannot "piggy-back" off the work of others. Professors can foster individual accountability in a number of ways. They can test students individually, have students explain what they have learned to a classmate, or observe each group and document the contributions of each member. Students who learn together subsequently perform higher as individuals.

3. Face-to-Face Promotive Interaction. This element involves group members helping, supporting, and praising each other's efforts to learn. This type of interaction can manifest itself in many ways. Students can orally explain how to solve problems, discuss the nature of the concepts being learned, teach their knowledge to classmates, and connect present with past learning. To obtain meaningful face-to-face interaction, teachers need to keep cooperative groups small. Ideally, no more than two or four people should be assigned to a given group.

4. Use of Teamwork Skills. Because many students have never worked cooperatively before, they frequently lack the necessary teamwork skills to do so. Thus, to contribute to the success of a cooperative effort, students must acquire both interpersonal and small group skills. For this reason, professors need to make a point of teaching leadership, decision-making, trust-building, communication, and conflict management skills as purposefully and precisely as academic skills.

5. Group Processing. This basic element involves students' assessment of how well they are achieving individual and group goals and maintaining effective working relationships within their groups. Such scrutiny enables students to maximize their own and each other's learning and to improve the quality of the group experience. Instructors need to provide the necessary class time for this activity and to teach students how to effectively analyze their learning processes. To gain expertise in using cooperative learning, educators need to be able to build these five basic elements into a lesson. Once they understand how to do so, they will discover that they can: 1) structure any lesson in any subject area using any set of curriculum materials to include cooperative learning; 2) fine-tune and adapt cooperative learning to their specific circumstances, needs, and students; and 3) intervene to improve the effectiveness of a cooperative group that is malfunctioning.

Cooperative Learning Structures for College Classes Using the five basic elements, teachers can create three different types of cooperative learning structures: formal cooperative learning groups, informal cooperative learning groups, and cooperative base groups.

Formal Cooperative Learning Groups

Formal cooperative learning groups are ideally suited to teaching specific content and for this reason they tend to be the first type of cooperative group novices experiment with. Say, for instance, a professor wants students to solve a set of problems, analyze a literary work or work of art, write a composition, conduct a survey or experiment, read a textbook chapter or reference book, learn vocabulary, or answer questions at the end of the chapter. He or she could use formal cooperative learning groups to implement any of these lessons. Students in formal cooperative learning groups usually work together for a specified length of time (one class period to several weeks) to achieve shared learning goals and jointly complete specific tasks and assignments.

Educators using this type of group must do four things: 1. Make pre-instructional decisions. Every lesson should have academic and teamwork skills objectives. Academic objectives specify the concepts and strategies to be learned. Teamwork skills objectives specify the interpersonal or small group skills to be used and mastered during the lesson. (In a math lesson, for instance, students should not only learn how to solve a certain type of problem but also to check that every group member understands how to do the problem.) After specifying these objectives, educators must decide what size group to use (between two and four is best), how to assign students to groups (randomly is fine), how to arrange the room (groups separated with clear access to each group), what materials to prepare and how to distribute them (one set of materials to each student; one set to each group; or divide materials among members like a jigsaw puzzle), and what roles to assign (no specific roles; or varied roles such as recorder, summarizer, checker of understanding, elaborator, or encourager).

2. Explain the task and goal structure. Professors need to explain clearly to students the academic task and the criteria for success, and structure positive group interdependence to ensure that students think "we," not "me." They also should foster individual accountability, decide how groups will cooperate, and specify the teamwork skills the lesson will target.

3. Monitor group effectiveness and intervene to provide task assistance or to enhance students' interpersonal and group skills. During the lesson, professors should systematically monitor each group's progress. They can make formal observations, noting the frequency and quality of group members' contributions, or they can adopt a more informal strategy, offering group members anecdotal observations based on descriptions of students' statements and actions. Whatever approach they adopt, professors should decide on the basis of these observations when and if they need to intervene to improve students' academic learning and/or enhance interpersonal and small group skills.

4. Evaluate students' achievement and help students assess their progress through group processing. At this stage, professors provide closure to the lesson, evaluate the quality and quantity of learning, and structure one of two types of group processing. In small group processing, group members discuss how effectively they worked together, give each other feedback, and decide how they could improve the quality and effectiveness of future efforts. In whole-class processing, professors give the entire class feedback and focus students' attention on discussing the whole class's overall effectiveness.

In formal Cooperative Learning Groups

If educators want students to engage actively in meaningful reasoning, they need to make sure that students spend more time thinking this way and less time sitting and passively receiving information. Obviously, there are times when professors need to lecture. Lectures are extended presentations of factual information in an organized and logically sequenced way. They are useful for disseminating information and arousing student interest in a subject, and exposing students to information unavailable elsewhere or to content they might take much longer to locate on their own.

Typically, lecture sessions consist of long periods of uninterrupted teacher-centered, expository discourse that relegate students to the role of passive spectator. As some critics have pointed out, lectures by their very nature focus on auditory learners, and as the lectures proceed, frequently lose all students' attention. Moreover, lectures presume, among other things, that all students need the same information, presented orally, at the same pace, in an impersonal way, and without dialogue with the presenter.

A number of obstacles interfere with a lecture's effectiveness. The primary enemies include: faculty preoccupation with other events in their lives; student disinterest; student failure to understand the material being presented; feelings of isolation and alienation among students fueled by the belief that no one cares about them or their academic progress; emotional moods among students that block learning and cognitive processing of information; and entertaining and clear presentations that misrepresent the complexity of the material being presented.

When professors lecture, they may use informal cooperative learning groups to ensure that students are actively (not passively) involved in cognitively processing information. Informal cooperative learning groups primarily enhance direct instruction. They are typically ad hoc arrangements that last for only a brief period of time (i.e., intermittent two- to fourminute discussions during one class session). Such groups can help professors accomplish several objectives: 1) focus student attention on the material to be learned; 2) set a mood conducive to learning; 3) help organize the material to be covered in a future class session; and 4) provide closure to an instructional session. By forming informal cooperative learning groups during lecture sessions, professors can ensure that students do the intellectual work of organizing, explaining, summarizing, and integrating the material to be learned into existing conceptual networks. The groups also serve as forums where students can personalize learning experiences and identify and correct misconceptions and gaps in understanding.

Professors need to give informal cooperative learning groups an explicit task and precise instructions. They also should require the groups to produce a specific product, such as a written answer. While breaking up a lecture session with short cooperative processing times decreases the amount of time available for a given lesson, it also will help professors counter the problem of a lecture where the information passes from the notes of the professor to the notes of the student without passing through the mind of either one.

When using informal cooperative learning groups, educators should structure the discussion into three parts:

1. Introductory-Focused Discussion. Professors first assign students to pairs or triads. They then give each of these groups four minutes to answer a question that relates in some way to the topic the upcoming lecture will cover. Professors must stress that students need to reach a consensus. Formulating an answer forces students to bring to bear any related knowledge they already have at their command.

2. Turn-to-Your-Partner Discussions. With this technique, professors divide the lecture into 10- to 15-minute segments. This is about the length of time a motivated adult can concentrate on the information being presented. After each segment, professors instruct students to turn to the person next to them and work cooperatively to answer a question. The question should require students to summarize the material presented in the preceding segment; react to newly introduced theories, concepts, or information; or relate the new material to past learning so that they will integrate the new information into existing conceptual frameworks. Students should be able to answer the question in three to four minutes, so it has to be specific. Discussion between each pair should follow a specific format:

* Each student formulates his or her answer.

* Students share their answer with their partner.

* Students listen carefully to their partner's answer.

* Each pair creates a new answer that is superior to each person's initial response because it integrates the two answers and builds on both sets of thoughts.

To ensure that students are individually accountable for answering the question, professors can randomly choose two or three students to give 30-second summaries of their pair's discussions. Professors can repeat this sequence of lecture segment followed by pair discussion until the presentation is complete.

3. Closure-Focused Discussion. Professors give a closure discussion task that requires students to summarize in four or five minutes what they have learned from the lecture. This discussion task has three objectives: to encourage students to integrate what they have just learned into existing conceptual frameworks; to point them toward what the homework or the next class session will cover; and to help them identify any questions they might have. It also provides a sense of closure to the lesson.

Cooperative Base Groups

Cooperative base groups provide students with long-term, committed relationships that either last for the duration of a course (a semester or year) or in some cases until all the group's members have graduated. Typically heterogeneous in membership (especially in terms of members' level of motivation to achieve and task orientation), these groups are permanent and meet regularly (e.g., daily or biweekly). Primarily, they serve as forums for members to give each other the support, help, encouragement, and assistance each needs to progress academically.

Educators can use this type of group in two ways:

Course Base Groups. These groups tend to be heterogeneous groups of four that stay together only for the duration of the course. The larger the class and the more complex the subject matter, the more important professors will find course base groups. They personalize the work required and the inherent learning experiences. They also offer students a forum in which to clarify questions regarding assignments and class sessions; discuss homework; plan, review, and edit papers; prepare for tests; and verify that each member of the group is completing the assignments and making satisfactory progress.

Course base groups meet at the beginning of each class session. After greeting each other, group members check to see that no one is under undue stress. They then complete a quick self-disclosure task to help them get to know each other better, such as asking each group member to describe one good thing that happened to them during the week, and an academic task, such as checking to see if everyone has finished the homework or if anyone needs help in doing so. (Members should be prepared to briefly summarize what they have read and thought about.) After giving the students five to ten minutes for the group meeting, the professor begins the class session. At the end of each session, the base groups meet again to review what each member learned, discuss how they will apply and use that knowledge, and find out what help any one may need to complete the homework.

College Base Groups. Unlike course base groups, college base groups stay together until all of their members graduate. Departments assign all students (or all incoming freshmen) to a college base group at the beginning of an academic year. Advisors arrange class schedules so that group members have as many of the same classes as possible. The groups, which meet either once or twice a week to ensure that all members are making good academic progress, follow the same basic agenda as the course base group.

Integrated Use of Types of Cooperative Learning

Because all types of cooperative learning groups complement each other, professors can use each type in a single class session. For example, a class could begin with a five- to 10minute base group meeting. (This would work naturally only in those cases where all the group members were in a given course.) The professor would then introduce the session, covering its topic, objectives, and schedule, and move into a short lecture presentation, using informal cooperative learning groups. The professor might assign students to more formal cooperative learning groups after the lecture and give them an assignment to complete that would deepen their understanding and mastery of the material. Informal cooperative learning groups could come into play again toward the end of the session. At this juncture, the professor would summarize some of the most interesting ideas and conclusions generated by the formal groups and explain how the lesson leads into the homework assignment. At the end of the class, the base groups would meet again to review the material, discuss how to apply it to other assignments and situations, look over the homework, and figure out what help (if any) each member needs.

Of course, professors should not feel that they must use every type of cooperative group in a given lesson. They have to judge for themselves which type of cooperative learning group best suits their objectives. Further, novices in particular should start out slow and take the time to become adjusted to implementing cooperative learning groups and to hone their skills in using them.

Academic Controversy

The act of working together within any one of the three types of cooperative learning groups generates a fourth type of learning: academic controversy.

Students who work together frequently disagree and argue with each other. Genuine academic controversy exists in cases when one student's ideas, information, conclusions, theories, and opinions are incompatible with those of another, and the two seek to reach an agreement. Using intellectual conflicts for instructional purposes is one of the most dynamic and involving, yet least used, teaching strategies. "Process of Controversy," page 28, explains the six cognitive stages students pass through when tackling academic controversies. Professors can structure academic controversies by choosing an important intellectual issue and then assigning students divided into groups of four to explore it through the following five-step process.

First, the students research and prepare the best case possible for their assigned positions. (One pair should argue the con; the other pair, the pro position.) Each pair should do the research together and decide the most persuasive way to present its case. Both sets of pairs then meet and argue the merits of their positions. Following these presentations, the four should engage in an open discussion in which they continue to make the case for their side while critically evaluating the opposing side's viewpoint. After this discussion, the two pairs should switch sides and present another set of arguments. Alternating positions gives students a better overall perspective about the issue, moving them closer to being able to formulate an objective view. In the fifth and final stage of the process, the group drops all advocacy, integrates the best evidence and reasoning from both sides, and decides what members really think about the issue. Looking at each perspective simultaneously, they work to make the best reasoned judgment possible.

More than 20 years of research proves the benefits of academic controversy. Students exhibit higher levels of achievement, make higher-quality decisions, and devise more sophisticated solutions to complex problems. They also develop more positive relationships and greater levels of academic self-esteem.

Cooperation-As Good for Educators As It Is for Students Cooperation is as powerful a positive force for educators as it is for students. As cooperative learning should lie at the heart of any classroom, cooperative collegial teaching teams should lie at the center of any instructional program. These teams, small cooperative groups of two to five professors, should work primarily to continuously improve members' expertise in using cooperative learning techniques. They should also function as "safe places" where professors can share support, caring, concern, laughter, camaraderie, and celebration. The teams should meet weekly to define the processes of instruction, monitor each step, reflect on ways to improve the quality of the techniques, and celebrate each other's hard work in implementing cooperative learning.

David W. Johnson is a professor of educational psychology, specializing in social psychology, at the University of Minnesota. Roger T. Johnson is a professor of curriculum and instruction, specializing in science education, also at the University of Minnesota. The Johnsons co-direct the university's Cooperative Learning Center. Karl A. Smith is a professor of civil engineering at the University of Minnesota.

Copyright American Society for Engineering Education Feb 1998
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