Cooperative Learning

I was reflecting on what goes on in the classroom on a daily basis and realized that teachers need to implement new strategies in teaching and focus on cooperative methods. Cooperative learning methods are defined by (Cohen, 1994, p.30) as students working together in a group small enough for everyone to be able to participate on a collective task that has been clearly assigned and students are expected to carry out their task without direct and immediate supervision by the teacher. Olsen and Kagan (1992) define cooperative learning as the following:
Cooperative learning is a group learning activity organized so that learning is dependent on the socially structured exchange of information between learner and in groups and in which each learner is held accountable for his own learning and is motivated to increase the learning of others.(p.8)
Science education, in particular, has traditionally used group work for practical activities and project-based learning. One of the recommendations for practice that has emerged from constructivist research is that small-group discussion should be used in science lessons as a means of helping students explore their ideas and move towards more scientific ideas and explanations. Impetus for the inclusion of small-group discussion in science lessons has come from the development of ideas about social constructivism (Driver et al., 1994, p. 1). These authors, for example, report a study of the social construction of knowledge with a group of 13 year olds, who were invited to develop a model to explain the properties of ice, water and steam following activities relating to change of state. The effect of the discussion in groups was a significant success. Students brought together their knowledge that particles are in constant motion, and that this motion increases with temperature. The idea of the force between particles being present all the time was used to explain the apparent “making and breaking” of bonds. It showed that pupils can bring ideas and past experience together to take their thinking ahead, if motivated and given the opportunity.
Barbosa (1996) found the following:
The influence of social interaction on the classroom learning of science, focusing specifically on the conservation of mass in chemical change. Her study involved 200 students aged 11-15 years. The results revealed that social groups outperformed the control groups, in relation to higher quality of understanding of the subject content. This suggests the potential for cooperative groups to promote learning of abstract content and that the very process of group work can deliver much more than the sum of the individual parts (p. 939)
Johnson & Johnson, (1985) found that “cooperative learning experiences promote higher achievement than do competitive and individualistic learning experiences” (p. 250). Simmoneaux (2001) believes that “collaborative classroom discourse encourages students’ participation in science” (p.903).

References
Cohen, E. G. (1994). Restructuring the classroom: conditions for productive small
groups. Review of Educational Research, 64(1), 1-35.

Johnson, D. W., & Johnson R. T. (1985). Classroom conflict: controversy versus debate in learning groups. American Educational Research, 22(2), 237-256.

Olsen, W. B.et. al. 1992. About cooperative learning. In Cooperative
language learning: A teacher’s resource book, ed. C. Kessler. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:Prentice Hall. pp. 1-150

Simmoneaux, L. (2001). Role-play or debate to promote students at argumentation and
justification on an issue in animal trance Genesis. International Journal of Science Education,23(9), 903-928