Learning in Groups

When I was a graduate student at Texas Christian University I was fortunate enough to work with one of the most well known educational researchers in the area of learning strategies and cooperative learning, Don Dansereau. In addition, Angela O'Donnell, now a professor at Rutgers University and also a well-known expert on cooperative learning, was also a graduate student in Experimental Psychology working with Don Dansereau, at the time I was there. Both Dansereau and O'Donnell are mentioned often in Educational Psychology textbooks on cooperative learning, and yours is no exception. I have continued to collaborate with both of these researchers since I graduated and began here at U.M.R. I have conducted and published many studies on the subject while at T.C.U. and since, and have used group and team learning in my classes in many different forms. Therefore, it's not surprising that I consider cooperative learning to be one of my main areas of research and pedagogical focus. However, I continue to learn and experiment with the most effective ways to use it in my classes and in my research. Group learning often goes by many names (e.g., collaborative, cooperative, peer, and team), and takes many forms. It can be one of your most powerful learning tools as a teacher, but will only be effective when certain conditions are met, many of those you can read about in your textbook. I will briefly expand on your reading assignment in this commentary by briefly summarizing some of the lessons I have learned from my research and from my use of group learning in my classes.

In terms of research, one of my main foci has been on individual differences in determining the effectiveness of cooperative learning. I have found that, not surprising, students who are more extroverted generally benefit more. In addition, students who score higher on certain cognitive ability tests (those that measure a student's ability to integrate different sources of information) benefit more, and that, in general working effectively in cooperative groups often takes more cognitive skill than learning individually. Finally, in a fairly recent experiment I conducted at U.M.R., I found that dominance is a crucial factor in determining the effectiveness of students working in pairs. More specifically, one overly dominant member of a dyad can render the learning experience ineffective for the both participants, independent of any other factors. In my most recent research on collaborative learning, which combined cooperative learning with my present research focus on learning and the world wide web, I found that students who collaborated face-to-face perceive the experience to be more positively socially than students who collaborate in groups using an on-line discussion board, though their perception of the effectiveness of the learning does not differ between these types of cooperative learning.

As far as applying cooperative learning in my classes, I have learned many lessons as well. I would emphasize for the teacher who plans to use this method, that probably the most important of Johnson and Johnson's elements of effective cooperative learning are: a) individual accountability; and b) positive group interdependence. In other words, it's important to set up the groups so that all members have to be motivated to participate, and that one group member benefits when other members do well. I have also found that it is important to not rely on group grading for the majority of a student's grade. Further, I have found that group learning often works most effectively when there is not a lot of pressure for getting the correct answer, so that the goal is just for students to relate examples from their lives that relate to the material. I have had some disasters when I had cooperative groups compete against one another. I would be very reluctant to recommend this to any instructor. Also, in my research on Dansereau's "scripted cooperative learning" I have found the method to be very effective when comparing recall of information between scripted dyads vs. individuals using various strategies and unscripted dyads. However, in class scripted-cooperative learning only seems to work if the goal is for students to learn information verbatim and for them to recall it later, so for "higher order learning" which we'll address in future virtual lectures, I have found traditional scripted-cooperative learning to be overly structured and rigid.