Cooperative learning: Review of research and practice

Cooperative learning is widely recognised as a pedagogical practice that promotes socialization and learning among students from pre-school through to tertiary level and across different subject domains. It involves students working together to achieve common goals or complete group tasks - goals and tasks that they would be unable to complete by themselves. The purpose of this paper is to review developments in research and practice on cooperative learning and to examine the factors that help to explain its success. In particular, the review focuses on the key elements that contribute to its success and the role teachers play in developing students' thinking and learning when implementing this pedagogical practice in their classrooms

Dialogic interactions in the cooperative classroom

Attention in recent years has turned to the key role talk plays in mediating students' learning when they work cooperatively together. There is no doubt that talk, albeit by the teacher or peers, has the capacity to stimulate and extend students' thinking and advance their learning. Teachers do this when they encourage students to engage in reciprocal dialogues where they exchange information, explore issues, interrogate ideas, and tackle problems in a cooperative environment that is supportive of these discussions. In turn, students learn to listen to what others have to say, consider alternative perspectives, and engage critically and constructively with each other's ideas by learning how to reason and justify their assertions as they cooperate together. This study involved three Year 7 teachers and 17 groups of students (3-5 students per group) from their classes. The teachers had agreed to teach two units of cooperative, inquiry-based science across two school terms. All three teachers had been trained to use a dialogic approach to teaching designed to challenge children's thinking and learning. This paper presents examples of both teachers' and students' dialogic interactions and discusses the complementarity of these discourses even though the teachers used slightly different dialogic approaches in interacting with their students. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Cooperative Learning: Developments in Research

Cooperative learning is widely recognized as a pedagogical practice that promotes socialization and learning among students from kindergarten through to college level and across different subject areas. Cooperative learning involves students working together to achieve common goals or complete group tasks. Interest in cooperative learning has grown rapidly over the last three decades as research has been published that clearly demonstrates how it can be used to promote achievements in reading and writing, conceptual development in science, problem-solving in mathematics, and higher level thinking and reasoning. It has also been shown to promote inter-personal relationships with students with diverse learning and adjustments needs and with those from culturally and ethnically different backgrounds. In fact, Johnson and Johnson (2000)argue there is no other pedagogical practice that achieves such outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to review the research on cooperative learning and to examine the factors that contribute to its success. In particular, the review focuses on the key elements that underpin successful cooperative learning, including group structure, composition and task, and the key role teachers’ play in developing students’ thinking and learning. The intention is to provide insights on how teachers can effectively utilize this pedagogical approach to teaching and learning in their classrooms

Cooperative Learning: Review of Research and Practice

Cooperative learning is widely recognized as a pedagogical practice that promotes socialization and learning among students from pre-school through to tertiary level and across different subject domains. It involves students working together to achieve common goals or complete group tasks – goals and tasks that they would be unable to complete by themselves. The purpose of this paper is to review developments in research and practice on cooperative learning and to examine the factors that help to explain its success. In particular, the review focuses on the key elements that contribute to its success and the role teachers’ play in developing students’ thinking and learning when implementing this pedagogical practice in their classrooms

Cooperative Learning: The behavioural and neurological markers that help to explain its success

Cooperative learning is widely recognised as a pedagogical practice that promotes socialisation and learning among students from preschool to post-secondary education and across different key learning areas and subject domains. It involves students working together in small groups to achieve common goals or complete group tasks. Interest in cooperative learning has grown rapidly over the last three decades, as research clearly demonstrates how it can be used to promote a range of achievements in reading and writing, conceptual understanding and problem-solving in science and mathematics, and higher level thinking and reasoning. It has also been shown to promote interpersonal relationships among students with diverse learning and adjustments needs and among those from culturally and ethnically different backgrounds. In fact, it is argued that there is no other pedagogical practice that achieves such outcomes. The purpose of this presentation is to highlight those factors that have been found to contribute to the success of cooperative learning, including recent research in neuroscience that helps to explain how and why students learn when they cooperate

Ten Australian elementary teachers' discourse and reported pedagogical practices during cooperative learning

This article describes the types of discourse 10 Australian grade 4-6 teachers used after they had been trained to embed cooperative learning in their curriculum and to use communication skills to promote students' thinking and to scaffold their learning. One audiotaped classroom social science lesson involving cooperative learning was analyzed for each teacher. We provide vignettes from 2 teachers as they worked with groups and from 2 student groups. The data from the audiotapes showed that the teachers used a range of mediated-learning behaviors in their interactions with the children that included challenging their perspectives, asking more cognitive and metacognitive questions, and scaffolding their learning. In turn, in their interactions with each other, the children modelled many of the types of discourse they heard their teachers use. Follow-up interviews with the teachers revealed that they believed it was important to set expectations for children's group behaviors, teach the social skills students needed to deal with disagreement in groups, and establish group structures so children understood what was required both from each other and the task. The teachers reported that mixed ability and gender groups worked best and that groups should be no larger than 5 students. All teachers' programs were based on a child-centered philosophy that recognized the importance of constructivist approaches to learning and the key role interaction plays in promoting social reasoning and learning

Nurturing cooperative learning pedagogies in higher education classrooms: Evidence of instructional reform and potential changes

This article reports on a case study that examined the nature and extent of students’ participation in a cooperative learning (CL) intervention, and its effects on students’ learning, satisfaction and gains. The participants included 58 undergraduate students and 2 teachers. The quantitative results showed that 4 inter-correlated pedagogical factors: Cooperative interaction, task orientation, academic challenge, and teaching effectiveness, together accounted for 69% and 52% of the variance in students’ learning satisfaction and gains scores, respectively. Each factor significantly predicted students’ learning satisfaction and gains, β ≥.27. Also, the qualitative results demonstrated that the teachers were able to incorporate CL pedagogies to existing instructional practices. Correspondingly, students found that they were more focused on their learning, experienced more interaction and enjoyment, and gained more academically than they had achieved before being involved in this initiative. However, the academic culture and local constraints were negative influences on implementation; findings provide an initial evidence-base that demonstrate how shifting the focus of classroom instruction from a content-centred form to a learning-centred form impacts not only the quality of teaching in class but also the quality of learning and other important indicators of students’ success

Group composition of cooperative learning: Does heterogeneous grouping work in Asian classrooms?

Constructing an appropriate group is important to teamwork success. Although, heterogeneous grouping is widely recommended in Western countries, this method of grouping is questioned in Asian classrooms because Asian and Western students have different cultures of learning. Unfortunately, this issue has not been addressed in any research to date. This study aims to investigate how Vietnamese students should be grouped so that they can maximize their opportunities to learn. The study is in two parts: a pilot study and an intervention. The pilot study included twenty students and was conducted for four weeks. The intervention consisted of one hundred and forty five students and lasted for eight weeks. In both studies, students answered a questionnaire survey and ten students were interviewed. The results of both studies showed that friendship grouping was more preferred. Future researchers should take these findings into consideration so that cooperative learning activities can be designed adaptively in Asian classrooms

Cooperative learning (CL) and academic achievement of Asian students: A true story

This paper reviews research examining the effects of CL strategies on the academic achievement of Asian students. Fourteen studies are included in the review. Sample characteristics, measures, findings, and effects are reported in a table. Achievement outcomes are found mixed with 50 per cent of the studies reporting neutral and negative findings and 50 per cent reporting positive findings. The paper also reveals mismatches between CL’s principles and Asian cultures based on what was reported in the reviewed studies. Future research needs to further investigate this issue. Also, for CL to work more effectively in the Asian context, there needs to be some further research that investigates how to change those principles of CL that may be inappropriate in the Asian context so they may be more compatible with Asian culture and conditions