12.11.06
Posted in competitive, Glossary of Important Terms, Collaborative Testing, Collaborative Learning, Cooperative Learning, Team-Assisted Individualization, Research Development Project at 12:53 am by youngsah
Collaborative Learning - This term sometimes used interchangeably with cooperative learning. Sometimes used to refer to cooperative learning that occurs more informally.
Collaborative Testing - testing groups or pairs of students rather than testing students individually. Grades can be given individually or as a group. Generally decreases test anxiety, increases performance, and in some cases increases the time students study for the test.
Competitive Learning - students learning individually or in groups. Either groups or individuals compete for grades or other recognition.
Cooperative Learning - students learning together in small groups that have some kind of common goal. There are many different methods of cooperative learning. This term sometimes used interchangeably with collaborative learning.
Group investigation – cooperative learning strategy by Sharan and Hertz-Lazarowtz where different groups investigate a subtopic and then the groups present what they’ve learned to the whole class.
Jigsaw method - method of cooperative learning. Students work in small groups (5-6 people) where each student is or a couple students are assigned to research part of the thing they are learning. After that individual work is done they go back to the group and teach that part to the rest of the group.
Scripted Cooperation – A peer learning method by O’Donnell, et. Al. that gives pairs (typically) of students a scripted approach to tackle a lesson that involves summarizing information followed by elaboration and criticism of the summary.
TAI (Team Assisted Instruction) - type of cooperative learning. 4 member heterogeneous ability teams. Students work both independently and as a team and are graded individually and as a team.
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10.30.06
Posted in Achievement, cooperative context, Collaborative Learning, motivation, Cognitive, Cooperative Learning, Annotated References - RDP readings at 1:54 pm by youngsah
Gillies, R.M. (2003). The behaviors, interactions, and perceptions of junior high school students during small-group learning. Journal of Educational Psychology, 95(1), p. 137-147.
This study examined over one hundred 8th grade students from multiple schools while participating in structured or unstructured group work in heterogeneous achievement groups over three semesters. Gillies focused on helping (both helping behavior and receiving help), task structure, and student perception. Students were less cooperative in unstructured groups than structured ones, but students showed similar learning outcomes. Students in structured group work also thought that group work was more fun and produced better quality work.
It would have been more interesting to have the structured and unstructured groups compared with competitive or control groups on these measures. But that wasn’t the author’s intent or line of inquiry. She wanted to look at whether there was a difference (looking at lots of measures) between structured and unstructured group learning experiences. She found a couple. Interestingly enough, although the interactions might be different the academic benefit was similar or the same. Students may feel differently about their group experiences but they were still educational experiences either way.
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10.22.06
Posted in cooperative context, Healthcare, Collaborative Learning, Annotated References - RDP readings at 6:00 pm by youngsah
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.
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10.09.06
Posted in Team-Assisted Individualization, Collaborative Learning, Achievement, Student Centered Learning, motivation, Cognitive, Cooperative Learning, Tutoring, Annotated References - RDP readings at 2:05 pm by youngsah
Slavin, R.E. (1996). Research for the future: Research on cooperative learning and achievement: What we know, what we need to know. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 21, 43-69.
A general overview of what this author thinks needs to be addressed in further studies in Cooperative learning. The author talks about the problem of different researchers agreeing that cooperative learning can improve learning but differing on how they explain these effects. The author also covers 4 theoretical perspectives (Motivational, Cognitive, Cognitive Elaboration, and developmental) and talks about their implications for further research. A couple minor perspectives are also discussed including Social cohesion (in motivational). The author talks about how tasks based on different perspectives are often hard to compare because they often use different methodologies (pairs, groups of 4, different kinds of tasks, etc.). The paper also covers the topics of individual and group accountability, and group goals.
Ha, ha, page 50 of this paper (and reiterated on page 58), “One of the most effective means of elaboration is explaining the material to someone else.” Then the author goes on to cite several studies. On the other hand, this paper does mention that advocates for gifted students sometimes make the complaint that cooperative learning is not as beneficial to them as it is to other students. More research needed. Other than the general good overview of the field, this article is for me hopeful because it shows that there are still a lot of problems and angles left to cooperative learning.
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10.08.06
Posted in Meta-Analysis, Collaborative Learning, motivation, Cooperative Learning, Annotated References - RDP readings at 11:08 pm by youngsah
Springer, L.,
Stanne, M.E., and Donovan, S.S. (1999). Effects of small-group learning on undergraduates in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology: a meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research 69: 21–51.
This meta-analysis on 39 studies focuses on group learning in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology (SMET) undergraduate classrooms. Research suggests that collaborative learning reflects the reality of scientific and technological practice better than competitive learning. Also, most elementary and middle school teachers of SMET subjects use cooperative learning. The authors define the differences between cooperative and collaborative learning. Generally, cooperative learning is more structured than collaborative learning and has carpeted goals and problems whereas people in collaborative learning must define these for themselves. The authors also cover motivational, cognitive, and affective perspectives on small group learning. Overall, small group learning was found to have significant positive effects on student learning in SMET classrooms.
Generally a good overview of different types of small group learning, followed by a pretty thorough explanation of the procedure of meta-analysis, followed by their results. First off, I’m torn between collaborative and cooperative learning. So I’m likely to start off on a research tangent. Intuitively I’m for both in different situations or even mixed for some sorts of situations, but we’ll see. Secondly, I found it slightly amusing that the authors complained a bit about the vagueness of other studies. They even suggested that future research be more clear in it’s methods and measures because vagueness limited the meta-analysis and possibly further study and reproduction of past studies.
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