Collaborative Learning Enhances Critical Thinking

When you observe problems, intervene to help students move forward on the task and work together effectively. The University of New South Wales provides handouts that instructors can use to promote effective group interactions, such as a handout to help students listen reflectively or give constructive feedback, or to help groups identify particular problems that they may be encountering.

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Whether the goal is to increase student understanding of content, to build particular transferable skills, or some combination of the two, instructors often turn to small group work to capitalize on the benefits of peer-to-peer instruction.

Setting up and facilitating group work: Using cooperative learning groups effectively. Many instructors from disciplines across the university use group work to enhance their students’ learning.

Articulate your goals for the group work, including both the academic objectives you want the students to achieve and the social skills you want them to develop. Collaborative learning: Its impact on college students’ development and diversity.

Determine the group conformation that will help meet your goals.

They found that cooperative learning produced greater academic achievement than both competitive learning and individualistic learning across the studies, exhibiting a mean weighted effect size of 0.54 when comparing cooperation and competition and 0.51 when comparing cooperation and individualistic learning.

In essence, these results indicate that cooperative learning increases student academic performance by approximately one-half of a standard deviation when compared to non-cooperative learning models, an effect that is considered moderate. Active learning: Cooperation in the university classroom (3 edition).

The small groups are essential to this process because students are able to both be heard and to hear their peers, while in a traditional classroom setting students may spend more time listening to what the instructor says. Cooperative learning: Improving university instruction by basing practice on validated theory.

Cooperative learning uses both goal interdependence and resource interdependence to ensure interaction and communication among group members. Journl on Excellence in College Teaching 25, 85-118.

They found that students who participated in various types of small-group learning, ranging from extended formal interactions to brief informal interactions, had greater academic achievement, exhibited more favorable attitudes towards learning, and had increased persistence through STEM courses than students who did not participate in STEM small-group learning.

The box below summarizes three individual studies examining the effects of cooperative learning groups. (1992) Teaching problem solving through cooperative grouping.