Cooperative Learning

COOPERATIVE LEARNING

(Theory, Research, and Practice)

By: Robert E. Slavin

1.     An Introduction to Cooperative Learning

Cooperative Learning

Cooperative learning is a variety of teaching methods in which students work in small groups to help one another learn to discuss and argue with each other, to assess each other’s current knowledge and fill in gaps in each other’s understanding.

            Cooperative work rarely replaces teacher instruction, but rather replaces individual seatwork, individual study, and individual drill. When properly organized, students in cooperative groups work with each other to make certain that everyone in the group has mastered the concepts being taught.  The students’ success in a group depends on their ability to ensure that everyone has grasped the key ideas.

            The implementation in the classroom instruction, cooperative learning has been increasing in use by some teachers in the last twenty years. It has been implemented by teachers as their main way of organizing classrooms for instruction.

            There are many reasons that cooperative learning is entering the mainstream of educational practice. One reason is extraordinary research base supporting the use of cooperative learning to increase students’ achievement, improved intergroup relations, acceptance of academically handicapped classmates, and increased self-esteem. Another reason is the growing realization that students need to learn to think, to solve problems, and to integrate and apply knowledge and skills.

            Cooperative learning can work well for classes with wide range of performance levels. It can help make diversity a resource rather than a problem. It has wonderful benefits for relationships between students of different ethnic backgrounds and between mainstreamed special education students and their classmates, adding another critical reason to use cooperative learning in diverse classrooms.

Competition

            Competition in education has been known to have detrimental effects to students’.  But if it is structured properly, competition between well-matched competitors can be an effective and harmless means of motivating people to do their best. Yet, the competition used in the classroom is rarely healthy or effective. That is why cooperative learning methods have been developed by educators to apply in the classroom as one of important instruction methods.

COOPERATIVE LEARNING METHODS

            Some of the most extensively researched and widely used cooperative learning methods are

Student Team Learning

Student Team learning methods are cooperative learning techniques developed and researched at John Hopkins University.

All cooperative learning methods share the idea that students work together to learn and are responsible for their teammates’ learning as well as their own. Student Team Learning emphasizes on the use of team goals and team success, can be achieved only if all members of the team learn the objectives being taught. In this method, the tasks for a team is not to do something but to learn something as a team.

Three central concepts to Student Team Learning methods are team rewards, individual accountability, and equal opportunities for success.

Teams may earn rewards if they achieve above a designated criterion. Teams do not compete to earn rewards. Individual accountability means that the team’s success depends on individual’s learning of all team members.

Accountability focuses the activity of the team members on helping one another and making sure that everyone in the team is ready for a quiz or any other assessment that students take without teammate help.

Equal opportunities for success means the students contribute to their teams by improving on their own past performance. This ensures that high, average, and low achievers are equally challenged to do their best, and that the contributions of all team members are valued.

Five principal Student Team Learning methods have been developed and extensively researched. Three of them are adaptable and applicable to most subjects and grade levels. They are Student Teams – Achievement Divisions (STAD), Teams – Games Tournaments (TGT), and Jigsaw II. The other two are comprehensible curricula designed for use in particular subjects at particular levels: Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition (CIRC) for reading and writing instruction in grades 2 – 8, and Team Accelerated Instruction (TAI) for mathematics in grades 3 – 6. All five methods incorporate team rewards, individual accountability, and equal opportunities for success, but in different ways.

Other Cooperative Learning Methods

1.      Group Investigation         

Group Investigation, developed by Shlomo and Yael Sharan at the University of Tel Aviv, is a general classroom-organization plan in which students work in groups using cooperative inquiry, group discussion, and cooperative planning and projects (Sharan and Sharan, 1992). In this method, students form their own two to six member groups. The groups choose topics from a unit being studied by the entire class, break these topics into individual tasks, and carry out the activities necessary to prepare group reports. Each group then presents or displays its findings to the entire class.

2.      Learning Together

This method is developed by David and Roger Johnson at the University of Minnesota. (Johnson and Johnson, 1987; Johnson, Johnson, and Smith, 1991). This method involves four to five member heterogeneous groups on assignment sheets. The group hands in a single sheet, and receives praise and rewards based on the group product.

3.      Complex Instruction

It is developed by Elizabeth Cohen (1986) and her colleagues at Stanford University. They also researched approaches to cooperative learning that emphasize use of discovery-oriented projects, particularly in science, mathematics, and social studies. A major focus of Complex Instruction is on building respect for all of the abilities students have. It requires a wide variety of roles and skills. Teachers point out that how every student is good at something that helps the groups succeed. This method has particularly been used in bilingual education and in heterogeneous classes containing language minority students, where materials are often available in Spanish and English.

4.      Structured Dyadic Methods

These methods focus on how each pair of student teach each other. These have been developed by Danseraeu, 1988; Greenwood, Delquadri, and Hall as Classwide Peer Tutoring. where peer  tutors follow  a simple study procedure. Tutors present problems to their tutees. If they respond correctly, they earn points. If not, tutors provide the answer and the tutee must write the answer three times, reread a sentence correctly’ or otherwise correct their error. After ten minutes the tutors and tutees switch roles. Dyads earning the most points are recognized in class each day.

A TYPOLOGY OF COOPEARTIVE LEARNING

Six principal characteristics of cooperative learning methods are:

1.      Group Goals

In the Student Team Learning methods recognition is given to the teams that meet a preset criterion; in the Johnson’s methods, group grades are given.

2.      Individual Accountability

This can be achieved in two ways. One is group score is given as the sum or average of individual quiz scores or other assessments. The other is task specialization, each student is given a unique responsibility for part of the group task.

3.      Equal Opportunities for Success

It is unique to the Student Team Learning method in the use of scoring methods that ensure all students an equal opportunity to contribute to their

teams. 

4.      Team Competition

It was applied in the early of studies of STAD and TGT to motivate students to cooperative within teams.

5.      Task Specialization

It is the assignment of a unique subtask to each group member (as key element of Jigsaw, Group Investigation).

6.      Adaptation to Individual Needs

It is specially done in Team-Assisted Individual and Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition; but most cooperative learning methods use group-paced instruction.

1.     Cooperative Learning and Student Achievement

            As the teams work, they are they trying to make sure that every teammate is learning. They quiz each other and encourage each team member to explain his or her current understandings so that others can correct misunderstandings and profit from each other’s thinking processes.

            The most important goal of cooperative learning is to provide students with knowledge, concepts, skills, and understandings they need to become happy and contributing members of our society. Later, this can enhance student achievement.

WHAT MAKES GROUP WORK WORK?

The theories explaining the superiority of  cooperative learning (Slavin, 1992, 1993) are of two major categories:

Motivational Theories

From motivational perspective (Johnson et al., 1981, and Slavin, 1983a), a cooperative goal structures create a situation in which the only group members can attain their own personal goals is if the group is successful.

Cognitive Theories

            These theories emphasize on the effects of working together in itself. Some cognitive theories are as follows:

            Developmental Theories. The fundamental assumption of the developmental theories is that interaction among children around appropriate tasks increases their mastery of critical concepts (Damon, 1984; Murray, 1982). Vygotsky (1978, p. 86) defines the zone of proximal development as “the distance between developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance. 

            Cognitive Elaboration Theories. Research in cognitive psychology has found that if information is to be retained in memory and related to information already in memory, the learner must engage in some sort of cognitive restructuring, or elaboration, of the material (Wittrock, 1978).

2.     Cooperative Learning and Outcomes Other Than Achievement

Through cooperative learning, students not only obtain academic outcomes but they also obtain non-academic ones. Among others are learning tolerance, respects for others, and an ability to cooperate with others: to listen carefully, give suggestions in a constructive way, and coordinate efforts toward a common goal, growing in self-esteem and appreciation for other’s perspectives. They find that learning is fun. They gain motivation to learn the materials.

Cooperative learning is not only an instructional technique for increasing student achievement, but also a way of creating a happy, pro-social environment in the classroom. It can give students benefits for a wide array of affective and interpersonal outcomes.

INTERGROUP RELATIONS

            Cooperative learning is an ideal solution to the problem of providing students of different ethnic groups with opportunities for non-superficial, cooperative interactions. Cooperative learning methods specifically use the strength of the desegregated school – the presence of students of different races or ethnic backgrounds -  to enhance intergroup relations.

ACCEPTANCE OF MAINSTREAMED ACADEMICALLY HANDICAPPPED STUDENTS

            Classroom should be changed so that cooperation rather than competition is emphasized and so that academically handicapped students can make a contribution to the success of a cooperative group, acceptance of such students seems likely to increase.

Research  on Cooperative Learning and Main-streaming

            Based on findings of researches, the effect of cooperative learning on social acceptance for academically handicapped children is greater than that of traditionally organized classes. Johnson and Johnson (1991b) found more cross-handicap acceptance as work partners among students in a cooperative condition than among students in an individualistic one. Though they did not state whether they found positive effects both for acceptance of handicapped students by their peers and for acceptance of non-handicapped students by handicapped classmates. The research on cooperative learning and relations between academically handicapped and normal-progress students generally shows that cooperative learning can overcome barriers to friendship and interaction between these students. These improvements can be obtained while achievement is being enhanced for all students in the class (Slavin & Stevens, 1991).

            Cooperative learning has been shown in a wide variety of studies to positively influence a host of important non-cognitive outcome, the overall effects of cooperative learning on student self-esteem, peer support for achievement, internal locus of control, time on-task, liking of class and of classmates, cooperativeness, and other variables are positive and robust.

3.     STAD and TGT

            Two of the oldest and most extensively researched forms of cooperative learning are Student Teams-Achievement Divisions and Teams-Games Tournaments. They are also among the most widely applicable forms of cooperative learning, having been used in grades two to twelve, in subjects from mathematics to language arts to social studies to science. STAD and TGT are quite similar; the only difference between them is that STAD uses individual quizzes at the end of each lesson whereas TGT uses academic games.

4.      TAI and CIRC

TAI stand for Team-Assisted Individualization, while CIRC stands for Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition. Cooperative learning methods designed especially for elementary mathematics or reading, middle school science, or high school composition would certainly be different from one another. Generic forms of cooperative learning also ignore issues of curriculum.

A.   TAI (Team-Assisted Individualization)

a.      Rationale

The need for some sort of individualization has been perceived as particularly great in mathematics, where learning of each skill depends in large part on mastery of prerequisite skills. The rationale behind individualization of mathematics instruction is that students enter the classroom with widely divergent knowledge, skills, and motivation. It is clear that teaching a single lesson at a single pace to a heterogeneous class incurs certain inefficiencies in the use of instructional time. Almost all students learn in class groups, not in individual tutoring sessions. Individualizing instruction in class groups entails costs in instructional efficiency that may equal or exceed the inefficiencies introduced by the use of a single level and pace of instruction.TAI math began as an attempt to design a form of individualized instruction that would solve the problems that had made earlier individualized programs ineffective.

TAI was designed to satisfy the following criteria for solving the theoretical and practical problems of individualized instruction:

1.    The teacher would be minimally involved in routine management and checking

2.    The teacher would spend at least half of his or her time teaching small groups.

3.    Program operation would be so simple that the students in grades three and up could manage it.

4.    Students would be motivated to proceed rapidly and accurately through the materials.

5.    Many mastery checks would be provided so that students would rarely waste time on material they had already mastered.

6.    Students would be able to check one another’s work, even when the checking student was behind the student being checked in the instructional sequence

7.    The program would be simple to learn for teachers and students, inexpensive, and flexible, and would not require aides or team teachers

8.    By having students work in cooperative, equal-status groups, the program would establish conditions for positive attitudes.

b.      Program Elements

Unlike STAD (Student Teams-Achievement Divisions) and TGT (Teams-Games-Tournaments), TAI (Team Assisted Individualization) depends on a specific set of instructional materials and has its own implementation guide.

1.      Teams

Students in TAI are designed to four-to-five member: heterogeneous teams. Just as in STAD and TGT

2.      Placement Test

Students are pretested  at the beginning of the program mathematics operations. They are placed at the appropriate point in the individualized program based on their performance on this test

3.      Curriculum Materials

For most of their mathematics instruction, student work on individualized curriculum materials covering addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, numeration, fractions, decimals, ratio, percent, statistics, and algebra.

4.      Team Study

The teacher teaches the first lesson then the students are given a starting place in an individualized mathematics unit. The students work on their units in their terms, following these steps:

a)    The students form pairs or triads within their teams for checking

b)   Students read their guide pages and ask teammates or the teacher for help if necessary

c)    Each student works the first four problems in his or her own skill practice

d)   When a student gets a block of four problems correct on the last skill practice, he/she takes formative test A, a ten-item quiz that resembles the last skill practice

e)    Students take their signed formative tests to a student monitor from a different team to get the appropriate unit test. The student then completes the unit test, and the monitor scores it.

5.      Team Scores and Team Recognition.

At the end of each week, the teacher computes a team score. This score is based on the average number of units covered by each team member and the accuracy of the units tests

6.      Teaching Groups

The teacher works for ten or fifteen minutes with each of two or three small groups of students drawn from the heterogeneous teams who are at the same point in the curriculum every day. Teachers use specific concept lessons provided with the program.

7.      Facts Tests

The students take three-minute tests on facts (usually multiplication or division facts) twice each week. The students are given facts sheets to study at home to prepare for these tests.

8.      Whole-Class Units

The teacher stops the individualized program and spends a week teaching the entire class such skills as geometry, measurement, sets, and problem-solving strategies.

B.  CIRC  (Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition)

a.      Rationale

The development of CIRC focused simultaneously on curriculum and on instructional methods is an attempt to use cooperative learning as a vehicle for introducing state-of-the art circular practices derived primarily from basic research on the practical teaching of reading and writing.

1.    Follow up

The major rationale for the use of homogeneous ability groups in reading is that students need to have materials appropriate to their levels of skill. One major focus of the CIRC activities prescribed for basal stories is on making more effective use of follow-up time. Students work within cooperative teams on these activities.

2.    Oral Reading

Reading out aloud is a standard part of most reading programs. Research on oral reading indicates that it has positive effects on students’ decoding and comprehension skills (Dahl, 1979; Samuels, 1979), probably because it increases their ability to decode more automatically and therefore focus more on comprehension (LaBerge and Samuels, 1974; Perfetti, 1985)

3.    Reading Comprehension

Several experimental studies have demonstrated that explicit instruction in reading comprehension strategies and meta cognitive monitoring process can increase students’ comprehension skills, or at least those skills specifically taught in the interventions (Brown and Palinscar, 1982; Day, 1980; Hansen, 1981).

A major objective of CIRC is to use cooperative teams to help students learn broadly applicable reading comprehension skills. During follow-up, students work in pairs to identify five critical features of each narrative story: characters, setting, problems, attempted solutions, and final solution.

4.    Writing and Language Arts

A major objective of the development of the CIRC writing and language arts program was to design, implement, and evaluate a writing-process approach to writing and language arts that would make extensive use of peers. In CIRC program, students plan, revise, and edit their compositions in close collaboration with teammates.

b.      Program Elements

CIRC consists of three principal elements: basal-related activities, direct instruction in reading comprehension, and integrated language arts and writing. The major components of CIRC are as follows.

1.      Reading Groups

Students are assigned to two or three reading groups according to their reading level, as determined by their teachers.

2.      Teams

Students are assigned to pairs (or triads) within their reading groups, and then pairs are assigned to teams composed of partnerships from two reading groups or levels.

3.      Story-Related Activities

Students use either novels or basal readers. Stories are introduced and discussed  in teacher-led reading groups that meet for approximately  twenty minutes each day. In these groups, teachers set a purpose for reading, introduce new vocabulary, review old vocabulary, discuss the story after students have read it.

4.      Partner Reading

Students read the story silently and then take turns reading the story aloud with their partner, alternating each paragraph. The listener corrects any errors the reader may make. The teacher assesses student performance by circulating and listening in as students read to each other.

5.      Story Grammar and Story-Related Writing

Students are given questions related to each story that emphasize the story grammar-the structure that underlies all narratives.

6.      Words Out Loud

Students are given a list of new or difficult words used in the story; they must learn to read these words correctly in any order without hesitating or stumbling.

7.      Word Meaning

Students are given a list of story words that are new in their speaking vocabularies and are asked to look them up in the dictionary, paraphrase the definition, and write a sentence for each that shows the meaning of the word.

8.      Story Retell

After reading the story and discussing it in their reading groups, students summarize the main points of the story to their partner.

9.      Spelling

Students pretest one another on a list of spelling words each week, and then over the course of the week help one another master the list.

10.  Partner Checking

Students complete each of these activities, their partners initial a student-assignment form indicating that they have completed and /or achieved criterion on that task.

11.  Tests

At the end of three class period, students are given a comprehension test on the story, then asked to write meaningful sentences for each vocabulary word, and asked to read the word list aloud to the teacher.

12.  Direct Instruction in Reading Comprehension

Students receive direct instruction in specific reading comprehension skills one day each week, such as identifying main ideas, understanding casual relations, and making inferences.

13.  Integrated Language Arts and Writing

During language arts periods, teachers use a curriculum on language arts and writing developed especially for CIRC. The emphasis of this curriculum is on the writing process, and language mechanics skills are introduced as specific aids to writing rather than as separate topics.

14.  Independent Reading and Book Reports

Students are asked to read a trade book of their choice for at least twenty minutes every evening. Independent reading and book reports replace all other homework in reading and language arts.

References

Dahl, P. 1979. An Experimental Program for Teaching High Speed Word

Recognition and Comprehension Skill. Baltimore University Park Press.

Johnson,  D.W & Johnson. 1991. Active Learning: Cooperation in the Classroom.

                        Edina, MN: Interaction Book Company.

La Berge, D, and  Samuel, Samuels, S.J.Toward a Theory of Automatic

                       Information Processing in Reading. Cognitive Psychology.

Slavin, Robert E. 1995. Cooperative Learning: Theory, Research, and Practice.

                        Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

COOPERATIVE LEARNING

(Theory, Research, and Practice)

A Summary to Fulfill one of the Tasks of

the Issues on English Instruction Class

Lecturer : Fachrurazzy, Ph.D.

BY

1.      SURYANI

NIM:  100221509260

2.      TEGUH RAHARJO

NIM:  100221509261

 

STATE UNIVERSITY OF MALANG

GRADUATE PROGRAM IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDUCATION

JANUARY 2012