Cooperative learning involves having students work together to maximize their own and one another’s learning (Johnson, Johnson & Smith, 1991). This page provides resources about cooperative learning, designing effective small group activities, and guidance for creating and sustaining effective student learning groups in engineering and lab courses.
Research on teamwork in professional contexts illuminates the issues that arise for students as well. Challenges often arise from sources other than differences of language or classroom experience; they can come from different views of organizations, hierarchy, decision-making, and -- perhaps most important -- expressing agreement or disagreement. Whether students see these differences as being individual or cultural may be less important than helping them identify differences and work through them.
Here is a short video on this teaching strategy.
Robin Fowler, College of Engineering, co-teaches Introduction to Engineering, a course in which student teams design, build, and test products for professional scenarios (e.g., Company X needs a remote-operated vehicle to investigate subglacial life at the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica). Teams need to apply course concepts to evaluate competing designs relative to client-generated objectives and constraints. However, teams often pursue suboptimal designs due to poor group process.
To enable more equitable and conceptually sound design decisions, Fowler shifted team meetings from face-to-face discussions to synchronous, text-based online discussions, during which team members are geographically dispersed. Fowler creates a Google Doc for each team, including each student’s individual project idea and a decision-making matrix to be completed as a team. Students simultaneously access these materials and negotiate decisions at preordained times using the commenting and chat features in Google Docs.
- Armstrong, N., Chang, S., & Brickman, M. (2007). Cooperative learning in industrial-sized biology classes. CBE - Life Sciences Education, 6(2), 163-171.
- Bowen, C. (2000). A quantitative literature review of cooperative learning effects on high school and college chemistry achievement. Journal of Chemical Education, 77(1), 116-119.
- Cockrell, K.S., Caplow, J.A.H., & Donaldson, J.F. (2000). A Context for Learning: Collaborative Groups in the Problem-Based Learning Environment. The Review of Higher Education, 23(3), 347-363.
This page provides a wide range of resources on Resources on Cooperative Learning, Group Work, and Teamwork including websites, articles, and bibliographies.
Portions adapted from Kerner (2009); Black, Gach, & Kotzian (2007); Chadwich (1989); Winter, Lemons, Bookman, & Hoese (2001)
| Your students will do most of their experiments as a member of a team where they will be expected to combine and compare data. Research on learning has shown that students learn better, develop interpersonal skills, and enjoy a course more when they work in a group-learning environment. In addition, teamwork typifies real-world science better than independent learning. Team learning does not mean that students simply work side by side on a problem, or the best student works while the others watch. Rather, a well functioning group has interdependent team members who effectively communicate ideas, interact around questions, analyze data, and problem solve together. Your job as an instructor is to help students learn how to work in a team and to mediate learning difficulties. This section will provide skills specific to the laboratory class. See Guidelines for Using Groups Effectively for more information on working with student group work and teams in classroom instruction. |
|
