Cooperative Learning

Cooperative Learning:
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Cooperative Learning

Much of the following material comes from Dr. Richard Felder of North
Carolina State University and Dr. Rebecca Brent from East Carolina University.

What is cooperative learning?

Cooperative learning (CL) is instruction that involves students working in teams to accomplish a common goal under conditions that include specific elements (Johnson, Johnson, and Smith, 1991).

What isn't cooperative learning?

Cooperative learning is not simply a synonym for students working in groups. A learning exercise only qualifies as cooperative learning to the extent that the listed elements are present.

According to Jim Cooper, what are some benefits of collaborative
learning?
Cooperative learning:

increases student retention by increasing student involvement

can increase tolerance of diversity

can increase learning in televised and interactive video classes

can increase critical thinking skills

is an effective means to various liberal education goals

prepares students for work groups in later employment

builds a sense of community on campus

offers a method to improve instruction

responds to diversity of learning preferences and styles

can be used in university governance (TQM)

What are the specific elements of a successful cooperative learning
activity?

Positive Interdependence:
Team members are obliged to rely on one another to achieve the
goal. If any team members fail to do their part, everyone suffers
consequences.

Individual Accountability:
All students in a group are held accountable for doing their share of
the work and for mastery of all of the material to be learned.

Face-to-Face Promotive Interaction:
Although some of the group work may be parceled out and done
individually, some must be done interactively with group members
providing one another with feedback, challenging one another's
conclusions and reasoning and, perhaps most importantly, teaching
and encouraging one another.

Appropriate Use of Collaborative Skills:
Students are encouraged and helped to develop and practice trust
building, leadership, decision-making, communication and conflict
management skills.

Group Processing:
Team members set group goals, periodically assess what they are doing well as a team and identify changes they will make to function more effectively in the future.

How effective is cooperative learning?

A large and rapidly growing body of research confirms the
effectiveness of cooperative learning in higher education (Astin, 1993; Cooper et al., 1990; Goodsell et al., 1992; Johnson et al., 1991; McKeachie, 1986). Relative to students taught traditionally - i.e., with instructor-centered lectures, individual assignments, and competitive grading - cooperatively taught students tend to exhibit higher academic achievement, greater persistence through graduation, better high-level reasoning and critical thinking skills, deeper understanding of learned material, more on-task and less disruptive behavior in class, lower levels of anxiety and stress, greater intrinsic motivation to learn and achieve, greater ability to view situations from others' perspectives, more positive and supportive relationships with peers, more positive attitudes toward subject areas and higher self-esteem.

Another nontrivial benefit for instructors is that when assignments are done cooperatively the number of papers to grade decreases by a factor of three or four.

Why does cooperative learning work as well as it does?

The idea that students learn more by doing something active than by simply watching and listening has long been known to both cognitive psychologists and effective teachers (Bonwell and Eison, 1991), and cooperative learning is by its nature an active method.

Weak students working individually are likely to give up when they get stuck; working cooperatively, they keep going.

Strong students faced with the task of explaining and clarifying
material to weaker students often find gaps in their own understanding and fill them in.

Students working alone may tend to delay completing assignments or skip them altogether, but when they know that others are counting on them, they are often driven to do the work in a timely manner.

Students working competitively have incentives not to help one
another; working cooperatively, they are rewarded for helping

Why do some students resist cooperative learning?

The proven benefits of cooperative learning notwithstanding,
instructors who attempt it frequently encounter resistance and
sometimes open hostility from the students.

Bright students complain about begin held back by their slower
teammates.

Weaker or less assertive students complain about being discounted
or ignored in group sessions and resentments build when some team members fail to pull their weight.

Instructors with sufficient patience generally find ways to deal with
these problems, but others become discouraged and revert to the
traditional teacher-centered instructional paradigm, which is a loss both for them and for their students.

What are strategies to promote positive interdependence?

Require a single group product.

Assign rotating group roles.

Give each member different critical resources, as in Jigsaw.
Select one member of each group to explain (in an oral report or a
written test) both the team's results and the methods used to achieve them and give every team member the grade earned by that individual. Avoid selecting the strongest students in the groups.

Give bonuses on tests to groups for which the lowest team grade or
the average team grade exceeds a specified minimum.

(The last two strategies provide powerful incentives for the stronger
team members to make sure that the weaker ones understand the
assignment solution and the material to be covered on the test.)

Promote individual accountability. The most common way to achieve this goal is to give primarily individual tests. Another is the technique mentioned above of selecting an individual team member to present or explain the team's results. Some authors suggest having each team member rate everyone's effort as a percentage of the total team effort on an assignment and using the results to identify non-contributors and possibly to adjust individual assignment grades. Others recommend against this procedure on the grounds that it moves the team away from cooperation and back toward competition. You may wish to use this method only in classes in which students have repeatedly expressed complaints about irresponsible team members.

Have groups regularly assess their performance. Especially in early
assignments, require them to discuss what worked well, what
difficulties arose, and what each member could do to make things
work better next time. The conclusions should be handed in with the
final group report or solution set, a requirement that motivates the
students to take the exercise more seriously than they otherwise
might.

Offer ideas for effective group functioning: Working effectively in
teams is not something people are born knowing how to do, nor is it a skill routinely taught in school. Quite the contrary in fact, as Bellamy et al. (1994) observe, working together in college courses is more likely to be regarded as cheating and punished than viewed positively and encouraged. The same authors note that "The traditional approach to team building in academe is to put three to five students together and to let them 'work it out' on their way to solving a problem. A better approach is to prepare the students with some instructional elements that will generate an appreciation of what teaming (as opposed to just working in groups) involves and to foster the development of interpersonal skills that aid in team building and performance."

What are some elements of effective group functioning that might be
given to teams as a checklist?

Show up for meetings on time.

Avoid personal criticisms.

Make sure everyone gets a chance to offer ideas and give those
ideas serious consideration.

Donít parcel out the work. Each student will understand their own
part but not the others, and their lack of understanding will hurt them
on the individual tests.

Don't allow a situation to develop in which one or two students work
all the solutions out and then quickly explain them to teammates who didn't really participate in obtaining them. If this happens, no one is getting the full benefits of cooperative learning, and the explainees will probably crash and burn on the tests. (This message may not get through to some students until after the first test.)

Don't put someone's name on the solution set if s/he did not
participate in generating the set, especially if it happens more than
once.

What can the instructor do to facilitate positive group experiences?

Provide assistance to teams having difficulty working together.
Teams with problems should be invited or required to meet with the
instructor to discuss possible solutions. The instructor should
facilitate the discussion and may suggest alternatives but should not
impose solutions on the team.

Allow teams to fire non-cooperative team members if every other
option has failed and also allow individuals to quit if they are doing
most or all of the work and team counseling has failed to yield
improvements. Fired team members or members who quit must then find other teams willing to accept them. In our experience, just the knowledge that this option is available usually induces
non-cooperative team members to change their ways.

Don't reconstitute groups too often. A major goal of cooperative
learning is to help students expand their repertoire of problem-solving approaches, and a second goal is to help them develop collaborative skills - leadership, decision-making, communication, etc. These goals can only be achieved if students have enough time to develop a group dynamic, encountering and overcoming difficulties in working together. Cooperative groups should remain together for at least a month for the dynamic to have a chance of developing.

Don't assign course grades on a curve. The only way cooperative
learning will work is if students are given every incentive to help one
another. If students are guaranteed a given grade if they meet a
specified standard (e.g. a weighted average grade of 90 or better for
an A), they have everything to gain and nothing to lose by
cooperating. If they know that by helping someone else they could be hurting themselves (as is the case when grades are curved),
cooperation is finished.

Can cooperative learning occur both in and out of class?

Cooperative learning may occur in or out of class. In-class exercises, which may take anywhere from 30 seconds to an entire class period, may involve answering or generating questions, explaining observations, working through derivations, solving problems, summarizing lecture material, trouble-shooting and brainstorming. Out-of-class activities include carrying out experiments or research studies, completing problem sets or design projects, writing reports, and preparing class presentations.

How should the instructor assign team roles?

Assign team roles that rotate with each assignment. Johnson et al.
(1991) suggest (1) the coordinator (organizes assignment into subtasks, allocates responsibilities, keeps group on task), (2) the checker (monitors both the solutions and every team member's comprehension of them), and (3) the recorder (checks for consensus, writes the final group solution). Heller et al. (1992) propose (4) the skeptic (plays devil's advocate, suggests alternative possibilities, keeps group from leaping to premature conclusions). Only the names of the students who actually participated should appear on the final product with their team roles for that assignment
identified.

If I spend all this time in class on group exercises, will I get through
the syllabus?

You don't have to spend that much time on in-class group work to be effective with it. Simply take some of the questions you would
normally ask the whole class in your lecture and pose them to groups instead, giving them as little as 30 seconds to come up with answers. One or two such exercises that take a total of five minutes can keep a class relatively attentive for an entire 50-minute period.

On a broader note, covering the syllabus does not mean that teaching has been successful. What matters is how much of the material covered was actually learned. Students learn by doing, not by watching and listening. Instead of presenting all the course material explicitly in lectures, try putting explanatory paragraphs, diagrams, and detailed derivations in handouts, leaving gaps to be filled in during class or by the students on their own time. (If you announce that some of the gaps will be the subject of test questions and then keep your promise, the students will read the handouts.) You can then devote the hours of board-writing time you save to active learning exercises. Your classes will be more lively and will lead to more learning, and you will still cover the syllabus.

If I don't lecture, will I lose control of the class?

That's what some instructors think. Another way to look at it is that
several times during a class period your students may become
heavily involved in discussing, problem solving, and struggling to
understand what you're trying to get them to learn, and you may have to work for a few seconds to bring their attention back to you. There are worse problems.

If I assign homework in groups, will some students "hitchhike,"
getting credit for work in which they did not actively participate?

This is always a danger, although students determined to get a free
ride will usually find a way, whether the assignments are done
individually or in groups. In fact, cooperative learning that includes
provisions to assure individual accountability cuts down on
hitchhiking. Students who don't actually participate in problem
solving will generally fail the individual tests, especially if the
assignments are challenging (as they always should be if they are
assigned to groups) and the tests truly reflect the skills involved in the assignments. If the group work only counts for a fraction of the
overall course grade (say, 10-20%), hitchhikers can get high marks
on the homework and still fail the course.

A technique to assure active involvement by all team members is to
call randomly on individual students to present solutions to group
problems with everyone in the group getting a grade based on the
selected student's response. The technique is particularly effective if the instructor tends to avoid calling on the best students, who then
make it their business to make sure that their teammates all
understand the solutions. Another approach is to have all team
members anonymously evaluate every member's level of participation on an assignment (e.g. as a percentage of the total team effort). These evaluations usually reveal hitchhikers. Students want to be nice to one another and may agree to put names on assignments of teammates who barely participated, but they are less likely to credit them with high levels of participation.

Groups working together on homework assignments may rely on one or two people to get all the problem solutions started. The others may then have difficulties on individual tests when they must begin the solutions themselves.

This is a legitimate problem. An effective way to avoid it is for each
group member to set up and outline each problem solution
individually, and then for the group to work together to obtain the
complete solutions. If the students are instructed in this strategy and
are periodically reminded of it, some or all of them will discover its
effectiveness and adopt it. There is also merit in assigning some
individual homework problems to give the students practice in the
problem-solving mode they will encounter on the tests.

What should I do with groups who are not working together well or
are not getting along at all?

This often happens with group work in any academic or professional
setting. When students come to you complaining about some group
member dominating or never showing up or about their having to
carry most of the load themselves, you might begin by welcoming
them to the real world. Point out that they will probably spend a good
part of their professional careers working with others, some of whom they won't care for, and suggest that this is a good time to start learning how to do it.

Propose corrective measures. If you have not previously required
team assessment of the group process as part of some or all
assignments, do it now with the groups having problems or
(preferably) with all groups. Sometimes students find it easier to
complain to you than to discuss problem situations frankly with one
another. In the course of assessing what's not working well in the
group, the students may also figure out how to correct the problems
before they ever get to you. You may invite them to have an
assessment session in your office and, if they do, try to steer the
discussion in constructive directions.

You may allow teams the option of firing non-cooperative members
after giving them at least two warnings and allow individuals carrying
most of the workload the option of joining another group after giving
their non-cooperative teammates at least two warnings. In our
experience, these options will rarely be exercised. Teams almost
invariably find ways of working things out before it comes to that.

When I tried cooperative learning in one of my classes, many of the
students hated it. They wouldn't cooperate, complained constantly
and bitterly, and gave me terrible ratings at the end of the course.
What should I have done differently?

As we observed before, instructors who set out to try cooperative
learning in a class for the first time are sometimes unpleasantly
surprised by the students' response. Instead of plunging eagerly into
group work and immediately exhibiting the promised learning gains
and development of social skills, these students view the approach as some kind of game the instructor is playing with them, and some
become sullen or hostile when they find they have no choice about
participating. They may complain that they work better alone or that
they don't want to be held back by weaker students. Confronted with
group exercises during class, some may grouse that they are paying tuition - or their parents are paying taxes - to be taught, not to teach themselves.

Instructors who don't anticipate a negative reaction from some
students when they try CL for the first time can easily get discouraged when they encounter it and are likely to abandon the approach rather than trying to get past the resistance. It is not sufficient simply to put the students in groups and hope that they will immediately see the benefits. They must be persuaded that cooperative learning is not something you are doing on a whim or as an educational experiment but a proven approach that has been repeatedly shown to work in students' interests.

Before you do in-class group work for the first time, announce that
you plan on using such exercises regularly during the class, because research shows that students learn by doing, not by watching and listening. You can reinforce your point by adding one or more of the following observations: You have had the experience of sitting through a well-organized and well-delivered lecture believing that you understood it, but then later when you tried to do the homework you realized that you didn't understand the lecture at all. By working actively for brief periods in class, you're getting a head start on the homework by starting to understand the lecture while it's going on. Even the most dedicated students can't stay focused on a lecture for more than about 10 minutes, and most can't go that long. Your attention starts to drift, first for short periods, then for longer ones. By the end of a 50-minute period, you are likely to hear and remember less than 20% of the content. Short group exercises during a lecture cut down on boredom and increase the amount of the lecture that you'll actually hear.

If you have students complaining about being slowed down by having to explain material they understand to slower teammates, tell them to ask any professor, "When did you really learn thermodynamics (or structural analysis or medieval history)?" The answer will almost always be "When I had to teach it. " Suppose you are trying to explain something, and your partner doesn't get it. You may try to explain it in a different way, then think of an example, and then perhaps find an analogy to something familiar. After a few minutes of this your partner may still not get it, but you sure will.
In our experience, most students bright enough to complain about
being held back by their classmates are also bright enough to
recognize the truth of the last argument. We also point out that most
students will eventually have jobs that require them to work in teams
and that learning how to do so is an important part of their
professional training.

Perhaps the most effective selling point (unfortunately) involves
grades. Many research studies have demonstrated that students who learn cooperatively get higher grades than students who try to learn the same material individually. Before assigning group work for the first time, Felder mentions a study by Pete Tschumi of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (Tschumi, 1991). Tschumi taught an introductory computer science course three times, once with the students working individually and twice using group work. In the first class, only 36% of the students earned grades of C or better, while in the classes taught cooperatively 58% and 65% of the students did so. Those earning A's in the course included 6.4% (first offering) and 11.5% (second offering) of those who worked cooperatively and only 3% of those who worked individually. There was some student resentment about group work in the first cooperative offering and almost none in the second offering, presumably because Tschumi showed the students the comparison between the grades for the lecture class and the first cooperative class.

There are many other proven benefits of cooperative learning that
could be explained to the students, such as seeing alternative
methods of approaching problems, being able to parcel out large
assignments, improving social and communication skills and gaining self-confidence. However, we find it best not to oversell the approach with long lists of benefits but rather to let the students discover most of the benefits for themselves. The arguments given above should be sufficient to persuade most students to approach cooperative learning with an open mind. After a while, their own positive experiences provide all the motivation needed.

I teach a multicultural class with many minority students who are at
risk academically. Does cooperative learning work in this kind of
setting?

In fact, the greatest cooperative learning success story comes from
the minority education literature. Beginning in the mid-1970's, Uri
Treisman, a mathematics professor then at the University of
California-Berkeley, began to seek reasons for chronically poor
performance in calculus by some minority students. He eliminated
explanations based on lack of motivation, lack of family emphasis on education, poor academic preparation, and socioeconomic factors and finally concluded that African-American students, many of whom were failing, studied alone and were reluctant to seek help while Asian students who did well worked in groups. He established a group-based calculus honors program, reserving two-thirds of the
places for minority students. The students who participated in this
program ended with a higher retention rate after three years than the
overall average for all university students, while minority students in a control population were mostly gone after three years. Treisman's
model has been used at many institutions with comparable success
(Conciatore, 1990).

What if I've done everything the cooperative learning literature
recommends, and some of my students still complain that they don't
like working in groups and would have learned more if they had
worked alone?

They could be right. Students have a variety of learning styles (see,
for example, Felder and Silverman, 1988), and no instructional
approach can be optimal for everyone. Moreover, every instructional
method - including straight lecturing - displeases some students, so
that consistently making all students happy is an unattainable (and in many ways, undesirable) objective for an instructor. The goal should rather be to optimize the learning experience for the greatest possible number of students. Extensive research has demonstrated that when properly implemented, cooperative learning does that.

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