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The role of cooperative learning is becoming more
and more prominent in chemistry courses. For example, four
of the five proposals funded by the National Science
Foundation to encourage systemic change in undergraduate
chemistry programs feature cooperative learning among
their strategies. There is general agreement in the research
literature that cooperative efforts are more effective than
competitive efforts in learning lower-level tasks. However,
there are questions about the effectiveness of cooperation in
helping learn problem solving and other higher-level
tasks. Zhining Qin, David W. Johnson, and Roger T. Johnson
addressed this issue in their report "Cooperative Versus
Competitive Efforts and Problem Solving", published in
Review of Educational Research 1995,
65, 129-143.
Qin, Johnson, and Johnson compared the impacts
of cooperative and competitive efforts on problem
solving. They integrated the findings from 48 studies by means of
a meta-analysis. Meta-analysis is a statistical method
that combines the results of different studies of a process to
draw conclusions about the overall results of
implementing the process. Its purpose is to
determine the size of the effect of independent variables on
a dependent variable. In this case, the dependent variable is
effectiveness in individualized problem solving. Some
independent variables of interest to chemists are
cooperation versus competition and the type of
problemfor example, linguistic versus nonlinguistic or
well-defined versus ill-defined. Linguistic problems are
primarily presented and solved in written or oral language;
nonlinguistic problems are primarily presented and solved
in pictures, mathematics, graphs, symbols, etc. A
well-defined problem has a clearly specified goal and representation.
An ill-defined problem contains some uncertainty about its
procedures and goals; a research project would be an
example in chemistry.
The authors restricted their analysis to studies of
problem solving and excluded those that simply involved
training to do exercises. They took the following components
as the essential elements of problem solving: the solution
process requires solvers to interpret the problem, not
simply to recognize it as an example of a type; to plan
potential sequences of actions or procedures to solve the problem;
and to execute the plan and check the results. The authors
were equally careful to limit their analysis to studies that
actually compared cooperation (as opposed to group work)
with competition. They defined cooperation as the presence
of joint goals, mutual rewards, shared resources, and complementary roles among members of a group. Competition
was defined as the presence of a goal or reward that only one
or a few group members could achieve by outperforming
the others (grading on a curve is one example). Finally, the
research studies used were ranked by their
methodological adequacy based on a random assignment of
participants to treatment (cooperative learning sections) and
control sections (competitive sections), clarity of definition
of the nature of the control section (an explanation of
what the control section actually did, rather than simply
"traditional instruction"), control for experimenter effects
(experimenters or teachers rotated through both
sections), use of the same content and curriculum for both treatment and control sections,
and verification that the pedagogy proposed for
the treatment and control sections was actually used.
The analysis shows that cooperation
resulted in higher-quality individual problem solving than did competition. The average
individual at the 50th percentile from the cooperative groups solved problems better than
72.5% of the population from the competitive
groups. The effect of cooperation was greater on all
four types of problems: linguistic, nonlinguistic,
well-defined, and ill-defined. Interestingly,
cooperation appeared to be more effective on problems that
might be of interest to chemistssolving nonlinguistic
problems benefited more than solving linguistic problems.
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