There was once a time when it was taken for granted that a quiet class was a learning class, when headteachers walked down the hall expecting to be able to hear a pin drop. In more recent times, however, teachers are more likely to encourage students to interact with each other in co-operative learning groups. Having students work in groups can be enormously beneficial or it can be of little value. How can teachers make best use of this powerful tool?
Co-operative learning has been suggested as the solution for an astonishing array of educational problems. It is often cited as a means of emphasising thinking skills and increasing higher-order learning; as an alternative to setting, remediation, or special education; as a means of improving race relations; and as a way to prepare students for an increasingly collaborative workplace.
How many of these claims are justified? What effects do the various collaborative learning methods have on student achievement and other outcomes? Which forms of co-operative learning are most effective, and what components must be in place for co operative learning to work? To answer these questions, this article reviews studies of co-operative learning in primary and secondary schools (for a more extensive review see Slavin 1995, 2009).
There are many quite different forms of co-operative learning, but all of them involve having students work in small groups or teams to help one another learn academic material. Co-operative learning usually supplements the teacher’s instruction by giving students an opportunity to discuss information or practise skills originally presented by the teacher.
Sometimes co-operative methods require students to find or discover information on their own. Cooperative learning has been used and investigated in every imaginable subject at all year levels. Student team learning (STL) techniques were developed and researched at Johns Hopkins University in the US. More than half of all experimental studies of practical co-operative learning methods involve STL methods.