Introduction to Cooperative Learning

Cooperative learning is the instructional use of small groups so that students work together to maximize their own and each other's learning.

Cooperative learning may be contrasted with competitive and individualistic learning. The key difference between these teaching approaches is the way students' learning goals are structured. The goal structure specifies the ways in which students will interact with each other and the teacher during the instructional session. Within cooperative situations, individuals seek outcomes that are beneficial to themselves and beneficial to all other group members. In competitive learning students work against each other to achieve an academic goal such as a grade of "A" that only one or a few students can attain. Finally, in individualistic learning students work by themselves to accomplish learning goals unrelated to those of the other students. In cooperative and individualistic learning, student efforts are evaluated on a criteria-referenced basis while in competitive learning teachers grade in a norm-referenced basis.

In the mid-1960s, cooperative learning was relatively unknown and largely ignored by educators. Elementary, secondary, and university teaching was dominated by competitive and individualistic learning. Cultural resistance to cooperative learning was based on social Darwinism, with its premise that students must be taught to survive in a "dog-eat-dog" world, and the myth of "rugged individualism" underlying the use of individualistic learning. While competition dominated educational thought, it was being challenged by individualistic learning largely based on B. F. Skinner's work on programmed learning and behavioral modification. Educational practices and thought, however, have changed. Cooperative learning is now an accepted and highly recommended instructional procedure at all levels of education.

Most of the original theories of cooperative learning have their roots on social interdependence and Lewinian field theory. Theorizing on social interdependence began in the early 1900s, when one of the founders of the Gestalt School of Psychology, Kurt Koffka, proposed that groups were dynamic wholes in which the interdependence among members could vary. One of his colleagues, Kurt Lewin refined Koffka's notions in the 1920s and 1930s while stating that (a) the essence of a group is the interdependence among members (created by common goals) which results in the group being a "dynamic whole" so that a change in the state of any member or subgroup changes the state of any other member or subgroup, and (b) an intrinsic state of tension within group members motivates movement toward the accomplishment of the desired common goals. For interdependence to exist, there must be more than one person or entity involved, and the persons or entities must have impact on each other in that a change in the state of one causes a change in the state of the others. From the work of Lewin's students and colleagues, such as Ovisankian, Lissner, Mahler, and Lewis, it may be concluded that it is the drive for goal accomplishment that motivates cooperative and competitive behavior. In the late 1940s, one of Lewin's graduate students, Morton Deutsch, extended Lewin's reasoning about social interdependence and formulated a theory of cooperation and competition. Deutsch conceptualized three types of social interdependence–positive, negative, and none. Deutsch's basic premise was that the type of interdependence structured in a situation determines how individuals interact with each other which, in turn, largely determines outcomes. Positive interdependence tends to result in promotive interaction, negative interdependence tends to result in oppositional or contrient interaction, and no interdependence results in an absence of interaction.

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