Cooperative learning in middle and secondary schools
Slavin, Robert E.
The Clearing House Washington
Mar/Apr 1996 Vol. 69, Iss. 4, p.200
Abstract (Document Summary)
Adolescence is a time when teenagers are particularly susceptible to peer norms, norms
that favor sports and social success over academic achievement. Cooperative learning and
the research supporting its positive effects on academic achievement and intergroup
relationships are discussed.
Full Text (3448 words)
Copyright Heldref Publications Mar/Apr 1996
Adolescence is a time of great potential and great danger in human development.
Characteristics of this developmental period have enormous importance for the design of
instructional environments, especially those for at-risk learners. For example, adolescents
are highly susceptible to peer norms. If those norms favor academic excellence, students
will be motivated to achieve. However, it is far more common that adolescents' peer
norms denigrate academic excellence and favor sports and social success. More
ominously, adolescents' peer norms usually value independence from adult authority,
which can lead adolescents into oppositional behavior-from skipping school to defying
teachers to drug use or vandalism. The structure of the traditional classroom is highly
inconsistent with adolescent development and peer norms. Traditional classrooms expect
students to work independently and to compete for good grades, teachers' approval, and
recognition. Research has long shown that when socially interacting peers are placed in
individual competition with each other, they discourage each other from working hard. In
adult occupational settings, this is called a "work restriction norm" (Vroom 1964). In
schools, students try to reduce each other's academic efforts (to make success easier for
themselves) by calling hard workers "nerds," "geeks," or "teacher's pets." This is much in
contrast to the situation in sports, where excellence is strongly valued by peer norms
(Coleman 1961). The difference between sports and academics is primarily in the
interpersonal consequences of success. In sports, one person's success helps the entire
team to succeed. In academics, one person's success makes success for others more
difficult.
Further, traditional schools treat adolescents as children, rarely giving them authority,
responsibility, or even opportunities for active participation. In fact, adolescents crave
responsibility and abhor playing a passive role. Little wonder, then, that so many of them
seek responsibility, authority, active peer-oriented participation, and adult-like roles in
antisocial arenas: delinquency (which among adolescents almost always involves groups
or gangs), drug abuse, early sexual experimentation, early parenthood, and so on.
Cooperative learning-instructional programs in which students work in small groups to
help one another master academic content-can be an ideal means of capitalizing on the
developmental characteristics of adolescents in order to harness their peer orientation,
enthusiasm, activity, and craving for independence within a safe structure. There are
many forms of cooperative learning that are widely used at all levels of education. The
particular forms developed and researched at Johns Hopkins University, called Student
Team Learning (Slavin 1994), were strongly influenced by James Coleman's (1961)
Adolescent Society, which contrasted adolescents' peer support for sports and social
activities to their lack of support for academics and proposed that the cooperative
dynamics of these peer-supported activities be embedded in daily classroom organization.
The purpose of this article is to describe the cooperative learning programs that have been
most extensively studied in grades 6-12 in middle, junior, and senior high schools and to
summarize the outcomes of studies at this level. Student Team Learning Student Team
Learning methods are cooperative learning techniques developed and researched at Johns
Hopkins University. More than half of all experimental studies of practical cooperative
learning methods involve Student Team Learning methods.
All cooperative learning methods share the idea that students work together to learn and
are responsible for one another's learning as well as their own. In addition to the idea of
cooperative work, Student Team Learning methods emphasize the use of team goals and
team success that can only be achieved if all members of the team learn the objectives
being taught. That is, in Student Team Learning the students' tasks are not to do
something as a team but to learn something as a team.
Three concepts are central to all Student Team Learning methods: 1. Team rewards.
Teams earn certificates or other awards if they achieve above a designated criterion.
Grades are not given based on team performance, but in senior high schools students may
sometimes qualify for as many as five bonus points (on a one-hundred-point scale) if
their teams meet a high criterion of excellence. The teams are not in competition to earn
scarce rewards; all (or none) of the teams may achieve the criterion in a given week.
2. Individual accountability. The team's success depends on the individual learning of all
team members. This focuses the activity of the team members on tutoring one another
and making sure that everyone on the team is ready for a quiz or other assessment that
students will take without teammate help.
3. Equal opportunities for success. Students contribute to their teams by improving over
their own past performance. This ensures that high, average, and low achievers are
equally challenged to do their best, and the contributions of all team members will be
valued. Research on cooperative learning methods (summarized below) has indicated that
team rewards and individual accountability are essential elements for producing basic
skills achievement (Slavin 1995a). It is not enough to simply tell students to work
together. They must have a reason to take one another's achievement seriously. Further,
research indicates that if students are rewarded for doing better than they have in the past,
they will be more motivated to achieve than if they are rewarded based on their
performance in comparison to others, because rewards for improvement make success
neither too difficult nor too easy for students to achieve.
Three principal Student Team Learning methods have been extensively developed and
researched in secondary schools (grades 6-12): Student Teams-Achievement Divisions
(STAD), Teams-Games-Tournament (TGT), and Cooperative Integrated Reading and
Composition (CIRC), which is used in reading and writing instruction in grades 3-7.
Student Teams-Achievement Divisions (STAD)
In STAD (Slavin 1994), the teacher assigns students to four-member learning teams that
are mixed in performance level, sex, and ethnicity. The teacher presents a lesson after
which students work in their teams to make sure that all team members have mastered the
lesson. All students then take individual quizzes on the material; they may not help one
another on the quizzes. Students' quiz scores are compared with their own past averages,
and points are awarded based on the degree to which students can meet or exceed their
own earlier performance. These points are then summed to form team scores, and teams
that meet certain criteria may earn certificates or other recognition. The whole cycle of
activities-from teacher presentation to team practice to quiz -- usually takes three to five
class periods.
STAD has been used in a wide variety of subjects, including mathematics, language arts,
and social studies, and has been used from grade two through college. It is most
appropriate for teaching well-defined objectives with single right answers, such as
mathematical computations and applications, language usage and mechanics, geography
and map skills, and science facts and concepts. Teams-Games-Tournament (TGT)
Teams-Games-Tournament (DeVries and Slavin 1978; Slavin 1994) was the first of the
Johns Hopkins cooperative learning methods. It uses the same teacher presentations and
team work as in STAD, but it replaces the quizzes with weekly tournaments, in which
students compete with members of other teams to contribute points to their team scores.
Students compete at three-person "tournament tables" against others with similar past
records in mathematics. A "bumping" procedure keeps the competition fair. The winner
at each tournament table brings the same number of points to his or her team, regardless
of which table it is; this means that low achievers (competing with other low achievers)
and high achievers (competing with other high achievers) have equal opportunities for
success. As in STAD, high-performing teams earn certificates or other forms of team
recognition.
Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition (CIRC)
CIRC is a comprehensive program for teaching reading and writing in the upper
elementary and middle grades (Stevens, Madden, Slavin, and Farnish 1987). In CIRC,
students are assigned to teams composed of pairs of students from different reading
groups. While the teacher is working with one reading group, students in the other groups
are working in their pairs on a series of cognitively engaging activities, including reading
to one another, making predictions about how narrative stories will come out,
summarizing stories to one another, writing responses to stories, and practicing spelling,
decoding, and vocabulary. If the reading class is not divided into homogeneous reading
groups, all students in the teams work with one another. Students work as a total team to
master main idea and other comprehension skills. During language arts periods, students
write drafts, revise and edit one another's work, and prepare for "publication" of team
books. In most CIRC activities, students follow a sequence of teacher instruction, team
practice, team pre-assessments, and quiz. That is, students do not take the quiz until their
teammates have determined that they are ready. Certificates are given to teams based on
the average performance of all team members on all reading and writing activities.
Mostly found in elementary schools, CIRC is also used in the early middle grades and has
been studied at that level by Stevens and Durkin (1992). Other Cooperative Learning
Methods Jigsaw
Jigsaw was originally designed by Elliot Aronson and his colleagues (Aronson, Blaney,
Stephan, Sikes, and Snapp 1978). In Aronson's Jigsaw method, students are assigned to
six-member teams to work on academic material that has been broken down into sections.
For example, a biography might be divided into early life, first accomplishments, major
setbacks, later life, and impact on history. Each team member reads his or her section.
Next, members of different teams who have studied the same sections meet in "expert
groups" to discuss their sections. Then the students return to their teams and take turns
teaching their teammates about their sections. Because the only way students can learn
sections other than their own is to listen carefully to their teammates, they are motivated
to support and show interest in one another's work. Slavin (1994) developed a
modification of Jigsaw and incorporated it in the Student Team Learning program. In this
method, called Jigsaw II, students work in four- or five member teams as in TGT and
STAD. Instead of each student being assigned a unique section, all students read a
common narrative, such as a book chapter, a short story, or a biography. However, each
student receives a topic on which to become an expert. Students with the same topics
meet in expert groups to discuss them, after which they return to their teams to teach
what they have learned to their teammates. Then students take individual quizzes, which
result in team scores based on the improvement score system of STAD. Teams that meet
preset standards may earn certificates. Learning Together
David and Roger Johnson at the University of Minnesota developed the Learning
Together model of cooperative learning (Johnson and Johnson 1994). The methods they
have researched involve students working in four- or five member heterogeneous groups
on assignment sheets. The groups hand in a single sheet and receive praise and rewards
based on the group product. The model emphasizes the use of team-building activities
before students begin working together and regular discussions within groups about how
well group members are working together. Group Investigation
Group Investigation, developed by Shlomo Sharan at the University of Tel Aviv (Sharan
and Sharan 1992), is a general classroom organization plan in which students work in
small groups using cooperative inquiry, group discussion, and cooperative planning and
projects. In this method, students form their own two- to six-member groups. After
choosing subtopics from a unit being studied by the entire class, the groups further break
their subtopics into individual tasks, and carry out the activities necessary to prepare
group reports. Each group then makes a presentation or display to communicate its
findings to the entire class. Research on Cooperative Learning A recent review of
research on cooperative learning (Slavin 1995a) identified fifty-two studies conducted
over periods of at least four weeks in regular secondary schools (grades 6-12) that have
measured effects on student achievement. These studies all compared effects of
cooperative learning with effects of traditionally taught control groups on measures of the
same objectives pursued in all classes. Teachers and classes were either randomly
assigned to cooperative or control conditions, or they were matched on pretest
achievement level and other factors. Academic Achievement
Of these studies, thirty-three (63 percent) found significantly greater achievement in
cooperative than in control classes. Sixteen (31 percent) found no differences, and in only
three studies did a control group significantly out-perform the experimental group.
It should be noted, however, that the effects of cooperative learning vary considerably
according to the particular methods used. Two elements must be present if cooperative
learning is to be effective: group goals and individual accountability (Slavin 1983a,
1983b, 1995a). That is, groups must be working to achieve some goal or earn rewards or
recognition, and the success of the group must depend on the individual learning of every
group member. In studies of methods of this kind (e.g., STAD, TGT, CIRC), effects on
achievement have been consistently positive; twenty-three out of thirty such studies (77
percent) found significantly positive achievement effects. In contrast, only ten of twentytwo secondary studies (45 percent) of cooperative methods lacking group goals and
individual accountability found positive effects on student achievement, and three found
higher scores in control groups.
Cooperative learning methods generally work equally well for all types of students.
Although occasional studies find particular advantages for high or low achievers, boys or
girls, and so on, the great majority find equal benefits for all types of students. Sometimes
a concern is expressed that cooperative learning will hold back high achievers. The
research provides absolutely no support for this claim; high achievers gain from
cooperative learning (relative to high achievers in traditional classes) just as much as do
low and average achievers (Slavin 1991). Intergroup Relations
Social scientists have long advocated interethnic cooperation as a means of ensuring
positive intergroup relations in desegregated settings. Contact theory (Allport 1954), the
dominant theory of intergroup relations for many years, predicted that positive intergroup
relations would rise from school desegregation if and only if students were involved in
cooperative, equal-status interaction sanctioned by the school. Research on cooperative
learning methods has borne out the predictions of contact theory. These techniques
emphasize cooperative, equal-status interaction between students of different ethnic
backgrounds sanctioned by the school (Slavin 1995b). In most of the research on
intergroup relations, students were asked to list their best friends at the beginning of the
study and again at the end. The number of friendship choices students made outside their
own ethnic groups was the measure of intergroup relations. Positive effects on intergroup
relations in secondary schools have been found for STAD, TGT, Jigsaw, Learning
Together, and Group Investigation models (Slavin 1995a, 1995b).
Two of these studies, one on STAD (Slavin 1979) and one on Jigsaw II (Ziegler 1981),
included follow-ups of intergroup friendships several months after the end of the studies.
Both found that students who had been in cooperative learning classes still named
significantly more friends outside their own ethnic groups than did students who had
been in control classes. Two studies of Group Investigation (Sharan, Kussell, HertzLazarowitz, Bejarano, Raviv, and Sharan 1984; Sharan and Shachar 1988) found that the
improved attitudes and behaviors of students toward classmates of different ethnic
backgrounds extended to classmates who had never been in the same groups. Self-Esteem
Students in cooperative learning classes have been found to have more positive feelings
about themselves than do students in traditional classes. These improvements in
selfesteem have been found for TGT and STAD (Slavin 1995a) and for Jigsaw (Blaney,
Stephan, Rosenfeld, Aronson, and Sikes 1977). Other Outcomes
In addition to positive effects on achievement, intergroup relations, acceptance of
mainstreamed students, and selfesteem, cooperative learning has been found to have
positive effects on a variety of other important educational outcomes. These include
liking of school, development of peer norms in favor of doing well academically, feelings
of individual control over the student's own fate in school, and cooperativeness and
altruism (see Slavin 1995a). TGT (DeVries and Slavin 1978) and STAD (Slavin 1995a;
Janke 1978) have been found to have positive effects on students' time on-task. A study
in the Kansas City schools found that when students who were at risk of becoming
delinquent worked in cooperative groups in sixth grade they had better attendance, fewer
contacts with the police, and higher behavioral ratings by teachers in seventh through
eleventh grades than did control students (Hartley 1976). A yearlong study of TGT and
STAD in middle schools by Hawkins, Doueck, and Lishner (1988) found that low
achievers who experienced cooperative learning had fewer suspensions and expulsions
than did control students; they also gained more in educational aspirations and positive
attitudes toward school. Conclusion
Research on cooperative learning methods in secondary schools supports the usefulness
of those methods for improving student achievement at a variety of grade levels and in
many subjects and for improving intergroup relations and the self-esteem of students.
Cooperative learning, especially when groups are rewarded based on the individual
learning of all group members, is an instructional approach that is congruent with the
developmental needs of adolescents. It gives adolescents a degree of independence and
authority within their groups, and it creates a situation (as in sports) in which the progress
of each group member contributes to the success of his or her peers. This creates peer
norms favoring academic excellence, a strong motivator for adolescents. Cooperative
learning is not a panacea for all of the problems of adolescence, but it can provide a
means of harnessing the peer-oriented energies of adolescents for pro-social rather than
antisocial activities, and for this reason alone it should be an important part of every
middle and high school teacher's repertoire.
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[Author Affiliation]
Robert E. Slavin is co-director of the Center for Research on the Education of Students
Placed At Risk, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland. This article was written
under funding from the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, US.
Department of Education (No. OERI-R117-40005). However any opinions expressed are
those of the author and do not necessarily represent OERI positions or policies.