Cooperative learning
...d (intrapsychological) (1978, p57). Vygotsky also came up with what is called the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). ZPD is the difference between what a child can do with help and what he or she can do without help (Vygotsky, 1978). ZPD plays an important role in cooperative learning because the teacher’s role in cooperative learning is to guide the students until they are able to complete the work on their own. Vygotsky’s theories reaffirmed the findings of Slavin, et.al. on cooperative learning and thus set the stage for what is now one of the most popular and widely-accepted teaching strategies. It is popular because of its accessability to educators. Since it is extremely flexible and comes in many shapes and sizes, teachers can adapt almost any lesson to include cooperative learning. It is widely-accepted because of the immense amount of research that exists that proves it to be effective. In Cooperative Learning Methods: A Meta-analysis, David Johnson, Roger Johnson and Mary Beth Stanne conducted a comprehensive review of all research that exists on cooperative learning methods and its effect on student achievement. This was the first meta-analysis of this kind. Their search turned up 164 different studies that included eight cooperative learning methods. The methods included Learning Together (LT), Academic Controversy (AC), Student-Team-Achievement-Divisions (STAD), Teams-Games-Tournaments (TGT), Group Investigation (GI), Jigsaw, Teams-Assisted-Individualization (TAI), and Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition (CIRC). Learning Together provided the greatest effect on student achievement when compared to competitive learning (Johnson, et.al., 2000). The Learning Together method of cooperative learning was developed by Johnson and Johnson in 1986. In this simple method, groups of four or five heterogeneous groups work on an assignment sheet. The group turns in a single sheet and receives praise and rewards if the final product is correct. Student-teams-achievement-division, TGT, TAI, and CIRC are classified as Student Team Learning. “Student team learning methods emphasize the use of team goals and team success, which can only be achieved if all members of the team learn the objectives being taught” (Slavin, p. 3, 1990). In STAD, students work in four-member heterogeneous teams to learn material. They are then given individual quizzes. TGT (Devries and Slavin, 1978; Slavin, 1986a) applies the same concepts as STAD except instead of taking the individual quizzes, students compete in weekly tournaments. Students cannot depend on their teammates to help them in the tournaments. TAI (Slavin, Leavey, and Madden, 1986) uses the same four-member teams as STAD and TGT, but this model combines cooperative learning with individual instruction. In CIRC, students work in teams to read and comprehend material, but each student reads at his or her own level. Contributions to the team are based on individual quiz scores and compositions. Students do not take quizzes until their teammates have decided they are ready. The Jigsaw method of cooperative learning has students assigned to six-member teams. Each team member reads a section of material, such as a particular section of a chapter, and then gets together with students who have read the same section of the chapter to discuss. Then, that student will go back to his or her group and swap sections with one of their group members. The process is repeated until every group member has read every section and discussed every section with other group members (Eronson, 1978). In Group Investigation, students are placed into groups of two to six. They each decide on a section of the unit to learn. Then they get back together and prepare a group report on each person’s findings (Sharan and Sharan, 1976). In the meta-analysis of cooperative learning methods(Johnson, et.al., 2000), the independent variable was the method of cooperative learning. In order to be included in the analysis, the study had to include a method of cooperative learning that contained positive interdependence. Somehow the subjects in the study had to depend on each other to achieve their goal. They could have used positive goal interdependence (mutual goals), positive reward interdependence (mutual rewards), resource interdependence (each member uses a different resource to complete the work), or role interdependence (each member is assigned a different role to perform within the group) (Johnson, et.al, 2000). Participants in the control groups were exposed to traditional instruction which was defined as working “alone or with a minimum of interaction and were given rewards on a norm-referenced basis or by ranking participants from best...