Research on Cooperative Learning and Achievement: What We Know, What We Need to Know

Research on cooperative learning is one of the greatest success stories in the history of educational research.While there was some research on this topic from the early days of this century, the amount and quality of that research greatly accelerated in the early 1970s and continues unabated today, a quarter-century later.Hundreds of studies have compared cooperative learning to various control methods on a broad range of measures, but by far the most frequent objective of this research is to determine the effects of cooperative learning on student achievement.Studies of the achievement effects of cooperative learning have taken place in every major subject, at all grade levels, and in all types of schools in many countries.Both field studies and laboratory studies have produced a great deal of knowledge about the effects of many types of cooperative interventions and about the mechanisms responsible for these effects.Further, cooperative learning is not only a subject of research and theory, but it is also used at some level by millions of teachers.A recent national survey (Puma, Jones, Rock, & Fernandez, 1993) found that 79% of elementary teachers and 62% of middle school teachers reported making some sustained use of cooperative learning.Given the substantial body of research on cooperative learning and the many cooperative learning programs in widespread use, it might be assumed that there is little further research to be done.Yet this is not the case.There are many very important questions in research on this topic, and a great deal of development and evaluation remains to be done.In its fullest conception, cooperative learning provides a radically different approach to instruction, whose possibilities have been tapped only on a limited basis.While there is a growing consensus among researchers about the positive effects of cooperative learning on student achievement as well as a rapidly growing number of educators using cooperative learning at all levels of schooling This paper is adapted from Slavin (1992).It was written under a grant from the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education (OERI-R-117-D40005).However, any opinions expressed are mine and do not necessarily represent OERI positions or policies.