Cooperation: Fundamentals of Design Teams

Have you had any experiences with cooperative learning? Do you have a study partner or a study group? If so, why do you voluntarily study with other students? Have you been required to submit a cooperative project or make a cooperative presentation? How was the project or presentation evaluated? If so, describe how (and if) the principles of team rewards and individual acountability were applied in your own experiences.

There are many different kinds of cooperative learning methods and an extensive research literature associated with cooperative learning.

Student Teams - Achievement Divisions (STAD) is a cooperative learning in which teams of students work together to prepare for traditional examinations. Team performance is based on the performance of individual team members and a handicapping system is applied so all team members have a realistic chance of contributing to team success.

STAD is a cooperative method suited to learning situations in which teachers present content which tends to emphasize facts, concepts, and discrete skills (Slavin, 1978). Learning situations of this type exist at all academic levels and in most disciplines. Introductory college courses in psychology, history, biology and mathematics fit. So does a great deal of the content taught in elementary, middle, and secondary school classrooms.

STAD fits comfortably within traditional classrooms. Students are assigned to small groups and are presented information by the teacher or through traditional instructional materials. Students then work with the other members of their team to understand and retain this material. The cooperative study activities might replace more traditional individual study activities. Finally, students are tested individually, and each must show what has been learned.

STAD is effective because of the power of learning activities that result from interaction with other students and because of improved motivation. The mental actions of students in a cooperative learning arrangement are productive because they are likely to involve the reworking of course information (elaboration or generative learning) and because there are many opportunities to check on understanding (metacognition). The motivational advantage of STAD comes from the encouragement of team members and from the system used to calculate team scores. To calculate team scores, student test scores are compared, with a base score calculated from each student's average score on past tests and team points awarded based on the degree to which the student improves. The base score is not the average score, but a fixed number of points less than the average score. This is similar to handicapping systems used in bowling or golf. In this way, all students have an equal opportunity for success, and students achieving nearly perfect scores are still able to help their teams. If a student's score goes down, the team is credited with zero points. This system keeps the focus on accomplishments without being overly punitive for temporary setbacks.

Teachers always ask about grading. What information is used to generate the grade that appears on a student's report card or ends up on the permanent record? Official grades should be based on students' actual test scores and not on improvement scores or team points earned. If the teacher feels it is important to reward team accomplishment in the grading process, up to 20 percent of the grade awarded may be based on the team score (Slavin, 1990).

Slavin, R. (1978). Student teams and achievement divisions. Journal of Research and Development in Education, 12, 39-49.

Chapter 9 emphasizes a cooperative method called Group Investigation because this approach involves inquiry and the production of a group project. Group Investigations could very appropriately be culminated in multimedia projects:

Stages in a Group Investigation.

• Identify the topic and form student groups
• Team planning
• Individual members of team conduct inquiry
• Prepare final project
• Present project
• Evaluation

What are some of the specific tasks assoicated with each of these stages? What are likely to be some of the issues in forming groups? What guidance will be necessary to facilitate team planning?

A MIXED GRADE-LEVEL COOPERATIVE HYPERMEDIA PROJECT

"Tell me again how I move the button," demanded Kyle, a student in MaryJane Nudell's sixth grade class. "It's stuck in the middle of the picture."

"Put the pointer on it, hold down the mouse button, and move the mouse," responded Angie, a second grade student in Pam Carlson's class. "Just pull it to where you want it to go."

Unless you read this exchange carefully, it may seem to explain how to perform a simple authoring technique. What a careful reading will reveal, however, is that a sixth grade student is learning the technique from a second grader. Normally, you might assume that sixth graders would have little to learn from second graders. However, you have already encountered two examples of projects completed by Pam Carlson's second grade class, and it probably doesn't surprise you that these students know how to do some things with technology that most older students have yet to learn. The advocates of cooperative learning argue that all students benefit when interacting to help each other learn.

Of course, sixth graders do have certain advantages and can provide valuable assistance to second graders. The project they are working on brings them into contact with reading material that would normally be beyond the capabilities of many second grade students. Here the sixth grade students are reading to the second graders and helping them with unfamiliar words.

The buffalo is a huge beast. A large bull will stand up to six feet at the hump, and may weigh as much as 1,800 to 2,000 pounds. They are fierce fighters, and a master bull will rule the herd with arrogant ruthlessness.

"Wait," said Angie. "What's a bull?"

"It is a male-a boy buffalo," replied Kyle. "Big boy buffalo can weigh 1,800 pounds."

"Well, we should write down that a male buffalo can weigh 1,800 pounds," said Angie. "Is our picture a boy buffalo?"

You have just read two scenarios from a cross-grade cooperative learning project. You may be familiar with cross-age tutoring arrangements in which older students assist younger students with some academic skill. This example is a little different. First, it describes the activities of pairs of students involved in the creation of a project. Both students contribute to the completion of the project. Second, this cross-age task allows both older and younger students to have an opportunity to serve as teacher and as student. Cooperative learning assumes that, for an effective experience, each student will make a meaningful contribution to team achievement. Although it might be unusual to find younger students instructing their older peers so that teams can accomplish their assigned tasks, this example provides an excellent demonstration of a cooperative experience in which the contribution of each team member was required for success.

This mixed grade-level hypermedia project was designed to develop several student competencies:

• Computer skills - Students will learn the appropriate terminology for a card, field, and button; be able to add and position a button or field on a card; and be able to link one card to another using a button.
• Content-area skills - Students will locate information in text relevant to assigned goals; students will summarize information for the purpose of creating notes; students will organize notes and write a brief summary statement.
• Social skills - Students will effectively demonstrate how to carry out assigned tasks; students will exhibit patience and understanding.

Here is how the project worked. Second grade students were shown pictures of animals native to their state and asked to select an animal they wanted to learn more about. Each second grade student was then paired with a sixth grade student. All student pairs were given the five categories of behaviors, food, habitat, physical characteristics, and importance to man and were told to find information about each of these categories for the animal they were investigating. All students were given a two-page description of their animal published by a state biological education group. The material in this source requires fairly advanced reading skills, so the sixth grade students read the fact sheets to the second graders. When the students found information they thought could be included in one of their assigned categories, they recorded this information in their notes. Students were given the option of using other reference material from the library, and some teams used these sources to build up the amount of information used to develop their presentations. Once the research phase of the project was completed, students sorted the information in their notes into categories and decided which items to include in their summary statements. The sixth grade students then wrote the summary statement for each category.

All pairs of students were asked to create their multimedia projects using a similar format. The first card would show the picture of the animal the group had selected and would contain buttons taking the user to other cards containing information for each of the assigned categories. The text information for each category would be entered in a field. Each information card would have a button taking the user back to the picture card. Each team was allowed to select button types and card-to-card transitions and to decorate their cards and to arrange objects on the cards as they wished.

Button Card and Category (Physical Information) Card

As you might expect, this type of cooperative experience requires that MaryJane and Pam be just as willing to collaborate as their students. The teachers had to be willing to spend the time to develop a sound instructional plan that would provide valuable experiences for each student and to coordinate their class schedules so that the plan could be implemented. They had to prepare their students for the roles they would play in completing the project. Cooperative learning requires a different kind of preparation and different teaching skills.

Activities and Projects for Your Classroom: Cross-Grade

Activities

Here are some examples of cross–grade level activities:

• Older students can teach younger students the features of a particular software application.
• Older students can key in stories that younger students have written, and the younger students can illustrate stories with pictures they have drawn with a paint program.
• Older students can do an in-depth study of a famous historical person. Younger students could then interview this famous person and write about what they learned.
• Older and younger students can survey their classmates on such topics as favorite pets, musical groups, foods, and hobbies. The older student could then enter the data and create a chart and graph with the information. The younger student could share this information with his or her classmates, using the chart as a visual aid.
• Projects can involve colleagues outside of school. Students in a middle school can visit a nursing home, pair up with a resident, and produce a Christmas letter to be sent to the resident's friends. The students could capture an image of the elderly person, insert it in the letter, and print copies.
• Foreign language students could write children's books in the language they are studying. Younger students could be paired with older students to create the illustrations and to write the equivalent stories in their native language.