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Panik, A., Bokovoy, J., Karoly, E., Et. Al. (2006). Research on the frontlines of healthcare: A cooperative learning approach. Nursing Research, 55(2S), pp. S3-S9.
Panik, A., Bokovoy, J., Karoly, E., Et. Al. (2006). Research on the frontlines of healthcare: A cooperative learning approach. Nursing Research, 55(2S), pp. S3-S9.
The Panik article tried to help emergency department staff conduct research on the department by using cooperative learning. The group of investigators consisted of both researchers/scientist and clinical staff. The advantage to this was that the researcher knew how to do research and the clinical staff knew the department so together they knew what questions to ask and how to get the answers to those questions in the most scientifically valid manner possible. They surveyed patients (or people with patients) in the Emergency Department waiting room. The questionnaire was collaboratively created by researchers and staff.
This article was more about cooperative functioning than cooperative learning per se. But sometimes groups are groups. So why did they use this perspective here? The answer reminds me of an article I read way back in the day (possibly high school or early undergrad) that talked about optimum group composition, brainstorming, and creativity. That article talked about how the world has increasingly specialized knowledge and in order for new ideas and creativity to thrive in a group process you have to have people with different kinds of “bits” of information. It’s good to have them from different fields but they still need to be able to communicate with each other in some fashion but the diversity leads to new combinations of “bits” and therefore the possibility for new and better ideas than would come of any of the separate collections of “bits” of the participants. So that’s what they had happening here. They had the scientists with their research “bits” and the staff with their pragmatic context/medical “bits”. Together they designed a study and a questionnaire that could be used in a working emergency department. This is something that either group probably could have done on their own but it would likely have been more difficult.
