COOPERATIVE LEARNING STRATEGIES

Publisher Summary This chapter describes the concept of cooperative learning strategies. By interacting with one another, students can improve their acquisition of academic knowledge and skills. Such interaction among students, based on equal partnership in the learning experience as opposed to a fixed teacher/learner or tutor/tutee role, has been termed cooperative learning. This type of learning appears to foster two potent activities: active processing of the information and cross modeling/imitation. The chapter discusses a research program that was designed to remedy drawbacks of prior cooperative learning studies by systematically analyzing the effects of learning strategies and individual differences on the acquisition of scientific knowledge and learning skills in the context of a dyadic learning situation. Student dyads were chosen as the unit of analysis because larger groups make it more difficult to delineate processing and interaction parameters and they may promote the formation of coalitions, thus encouraging competition rather than cooperation. The cooperative learning strategy used in the present research was originally developed as an individual text learning strategy. This strategy was modified for use in a dyadic learning situation. In general, the strategy requires each pair member to read approximately 500 words of a 2,500-word passage. One pair member then serves as recaller and attempts to orally summarize from emory what has been learned. The other member of the pair serves as the listener/facilitator and attempts to correct errors in the recall and to further facilitate the organization and storage of the material. The partners alternate roles of recaller and listener/facilitator.