What is cooperative learning

Johnson The fifth essential component of cooperative learning is group processing. Group processing exists when group members discuss how well they are achieving their goals and maintaining effective working relationships. Groups need to describe what member actions are helpful and unhelpful and make decisions about what behaviors to continue or change. Continuous improvement of the process of learning results from the careful analysis of how members are working together.

These five elements are essential to all cooperative systems, no matter what their size. When international agreements are made and when international efforts to achieve mutual goals such as environmental protection occur, these five elements must be carefully implemented and maintained. The study of cooperative, competitive, and individualistic efforts is commonly recognized as one of the oldest fields of research in social psychology.

Since then over studies have been conducted on the relative merits of cooperative, competitive, and individualistic efforts and the conditions under which each is appropriate. This is one of the largest bodies of research within psychology and education. An extensive literature search was conducted aimed at identifying all the available studies from published and nonpublished sources.

The research on social interdependence, furthermore, has an external validity and a generalizability rarely found in the social sciences. The more variations in places, people, and procedures the research can withstand and still yield the same findings, the more externally valid the conclusions.

The research has been conducted over twelve decades by many different researchers with markedly different theoretical and practical orientations working in different settings and countries.

A wide variety of research tasks, ways of structuring social interdependence, and measures of the dependent variables have been used. Participants in the studies varied from ages three to post-college adults and have come from different economic classes and cultural backgrounds. The studies were conducted with different durations, lasting from one session to sessions or more. The research on social interdependence includes both theoretical and demonstration studies conducted in educational, business, and social service organizations.

The diversity of these studies gives social interdependence theory wide generalizability and considerable external validity. Figure 1 shows the relationships among the outcomes. Cooperation and Competition: Theory and Research. From Table 1 it may be seen that cooperation promotes considerable greater effort to achieve than do competitive or individualistic efforts. Effort exerted to achieve includes such variables as achievement and productivity, long-term retention, on-task behavior, use of higher-level reasoning strategies, generation of new ideas and solutions, transfer of what is learned within one situation to another, intrinsic motivation, achievement motivation, continuing motivation to learn, and positive attitudes toward learning and school.

The impact of cooperative learning on achievement means that if schools wish to prepare students to take proficiency tests to meet local and state standards, the use of cooperative learning should dominate instructional practice. An important aspect of school life is engagement in learning. One indication of engagement in learning is time on task. In addition, students working cooperatively tended to be more involved in activities and tasks, attach greater importance to success, and engage in more on-task behavior and less apathetic, off-task, disruptive behaviors.

Quality of relationships includes such variables as interpersonal attraction, liking, cohesion, esprit-de-corps, and social support. Stronger effects are found for peer support than for superior teacher support. The high-quality studies tend to have even more powerful effects. It is difficult to overemphasize the importance of these research results.

There is a close association between antisocial behavior and rejection by the normal peer group. Rejected children tend to be deficient in a number of social-cognitive skills, including peer group entry, perception of peer group norms, response to provocation, and interpretation of prosocial interactions.

Among children referred to child guidance clinics, 30 to 75 percent depending on age are reported by their parents to experience peer difficulties. Moreover, children referred for psychological treatment have fewer friends and less contact with them than nonreferred children, their friendships are significantly less stable over time, and their understanding of the reciprocities and intimacies involved in friendships is less mature.

Peer group acceptance and friendships may be built through the extensive use of cooperative learning. Asley Montagu was fond of saying that with few exceptions the solitary animal in any species is an abnormal creature. Similarly, Karen Horney stated that the neurotic individual is someone who is inappropriately competitive and, therefore, unable to cooperate with others. Montagu and Horney recognized that the essence of psychological health is the ability to develop and maintain cooperative relationships.

People who are unable to do so often a become depressed, anxious, frustrated, and lonely, b tend to feel afraid, inadequate, helpless, hopeless, and isolated, and c rigidly cling to unproductive and ineffective ways of coping with adversity.

The samples studied included middle-class junior-high students, middle-class high school seniors, high-school age juvenile prisoners, adult prisoners, Olympic ice-hockey players, adult step-couples, and business executives in China. The diversity of the samples studied and the variety of measures of psychological health provide considerable generalizability of the results of the studies. A strong relationship was found between cooperativeness and psychological health, a mixed picture was found with competitiveness and psychological health, and a strong relationship was found between an individualistic orientation and psychological pathology.

Teachers who wish to use cooperative learning should ideally base their classroom practices on theory validated by research. The closer classroom practices are to validated theory, the more likely they will be effective. When more directly practice is connected to theory, furthermore, the more likely practice will be refined, upgraded, and improved over the years.

There are, however, few classroom practices that are directly based on validated theory. The close relationship between theory, research, and practice makes cooperative learning somewhat unique. It also creates a set of issues for teachers using cooperative learning. The first issue is understanding the nature of social interdependence. The interdependence may be positive which results in individuals working cooperatively to achieve their mutual goals or negative which results in individuals competing to see who will achieve the goal.

In competitive situations, the opposite psychological processes may be found. The fundamental premise of social interdependence theory is that the way in which goals are structured determines how individuals interact, and those interaction patterns create outcomes. Positive goal interdependence tends to result in promotive interaction, negative goal interdependence tends to result in oppositional interaction, and no interdependence tends to result in no interaction.

The second issue is understanding the research validating social interdependence theory. There are hundreds of studies indicating that cooperation, compared to competitive and individualistic efforts, tends to result in greater effort to achieve, more positive relationships, and greater psychological health. The diversity of this research provides considerable generalizabiity to the findings. The third issue is to understand the five basic elements that make cooperation work. There is nothing magical about putting students in groups.

Students can compete with groupmates, students can work individualistically while ignoring groupmates, or students can work cooperatively with groupmates. In order to structure cooperative learning effectively, teachers need to understand how tostructure positive interdependence, individual accountability, promotive interaction, appropriate use of social skills, and group processing into learning situations.

The fourth issue is to understand the flexibility and many faces of cooperative learning. When the five basic elements may be effectively implemented in formal cooperative learning situations formal cooperative learning may be used to structure most learning situations , informal cooperative learning situations informal cooperative learning may be used to make didactic lessons cooperative , and cooperative base groups which are used to personalize a class and the school.

Together they provide an integrated system for instructional organization and design as well as classroom management. When utilizing these three types of cooperative learning, any learning situations in any subject area with any age students and with any curriculum can be structured cooperatively.

Deutsch, M. A theory of cooperation and competition. Human Relations, 2, Cooperation and trust: Some theoretical notes. Jones Ed. Horney, K. The neurotic personality of our time. Students get some solo time to think about a possible answer- or to write it down- then they turn to their classmate sitting next to them and get some pair-time to share and discuss what they have just found out. At the end of this activity, the teacher randomly chooses two or three pairs and asks them to briefly share their answers or responses.

No matter how old students are- I have successfully used this strategy not only for small children but even in my teacher training courses — it is astonishing how much mutual interaction deepens their understanding. Think-Pair-Share can also be used to have students reflect on a topic, even when no right interpretation is needed, and, being the simplest and most famous cooperative learning strategy, can be the first one to be implemented.

Another very effective strategy for engaging students in answering a question is Circle-the-Sage. The teacher asks a question in class, and then asks every student who can answer it to stand up. All the other students can now choose a classmate and listen to the explanation. Peer tutoring has proven to be very effective for both sides: high achievers, who are already familiar with content, get the chance to prove it and learn valuable communication skills at the same time.

Students who missed a concept get the chance to listen to another peer explaining. Communication includes not only speaking, reading and writing, but also listening. And it is exactly in practising the latter that the next strategy focuses on. Timed-Pair-Share is perfect for students to interact and practise the language, so it can be used in every subject where the context is everything and it makes sure every student will talk and listen for the same amount of time. After having given a topic and some time to think about it, the teacher asks students to pair up and states how long they will share- one or two minutes are a good start.

In pairs, partner A shares and partner B listens. To rapidly check if the person who is talking is the one supposed to, partners can hold a pen while sharing. The strategy Timed-Pair-Share makes shy and less talkative students speak up and force everyone to be listening for a specific amount of time. Through this activity, students improve speaking and listening skills equally and get to know their classmates better.

Moreover: listening without the urge to respond helps listeners focusing on the speaker and listening only to understand, which is the definition of active listening.

In second-language instruction Timed-Pair-Share can be used with any possible topic, depending on language proficiency, whether for subjects like history or literature it can be used to ask for opinions or personal interpretations. A good way to involve some movement before starting a Timed-Pair-Share and to make sure students get to talk to everybody else in the classroom and not merely their neighbours is Agree-Disagree Line-ups.

The remaining students stand between, closer to one end or the other. Through Timed-Pair-Share, students listen carefully to those with a similar point of view those standing next to them in the line or the teachers folds the line so they listen to and understand a point of view different from their own. An effective cooperative learning strategy to implement peer tutoring in class is Rally Coach.

In pairs, students take turns, one student solving problems while talking through their thinking aloud, while the other listens, coaches where necessary and provides positive feedback.

Roles are then reversed to do another exercise. Rally Coach can be used to maximize interaction and feedback when doing exercises in class. Students learn how to work autonomously when solving the exercise, but also how to interact, give and receive feedback from a classmate. Simultaneous interaction is provided, since every student in the class is active at the same time- either in solving the problem or coaching.

Using Rally Coach, low-achievers get the help they need when doing the exercise and learn from high-achievers when coaching. If you want to learn how to implement these and more cooperative learning strategies, discover our self-paced online course:. Students have more opportunities to actively participate in their learning, question and challenge each other, share and discuss their ideas, and internalize their learning.

Along with improving academic learning, cooperative learning helps students engage in thoughtful discourse and examine different perspectives, and it has been proven to increase students' self-esteem , motivation , and empathy. Some challenges of using cooperative learning include releasing the control of learning, managing noise levels, resolving conflicts , and assessing student learning.

Carefully structured activities can help students learn the skills to work together successfully, and structured discussion and reflection on group process can help avoid some problems.

The authors of Classroom Instruction that Works cite research showing that organizing students in cooperative learning groups can lead to a gain as high as 28 percentiles in measured student achievement Marzano, Pickering, and Pollock Other researchers report that cooperation typically results in higher group and individual achievement, healthier relationships with peers, more metacognition, and greater psychological health and self-esteem Johnson and Johnson When implemented well, cooperative learning encourages achievement, student discussion, active learning, student confidence, and motivation.

The skills students develop while collaborating with others are different from the skills students develop while working independently. As more businesses organize employees into teams and task forces, the skills necessary to be a "team player" e. Using cooperative groups to accomplish academic tasks not only provides opportunities for students to develop interpersonal skills but also gives them authentic experiences that will help them be successful in their future careers.

TeacherVision Staff. Get information on cooperative learning, an instructional strategy in which small groups of students work together on a common task.