Cooperative Group Work

Abstract

Interest in cooperative group work gained momentum in the early 1980s with the publication of the first meta‐analysis on the effects of cooperative, competitive, and individualistic goal structures on students' achievement and productivity. The results showed that cooperation is significantly more effective than interpersonal competition and individualistic efforts, and these results were consistent across all subject areas, for all students from elementary school to college, and for all tasks involving conceptual understanding, problem solving, categorizing, and reasoning. This entry discusses the background research on cooperative group work and the factors that help to explain its success as an instructional strategy that has been shown to have a positive effect on student learning and socialization. The entry also discusses the key role teachers play in creating learning environments in their classrooms that promote cooperation and learning, and the linguistic tools that can be used to facilitate group discussion.