Cooperative Learning * Richard M. Felder 1 , and Rebecca Brent 2 1 Department of Chemical Engineering, N.C. State University, Raleigh, NC 27695-7905 2 Education Designs, Inc., Cary, NC 27518 Introduction Many students who have worked in a team in a laboratory- or project-based course do not have fond memories of the experience. Some recall one or two team members doing all the work and the others simply going along for the ride but getting the same grade. Others remember dominant students, whose intense desire for a good grade led them to stifle their teammates’ efforts to contribute. Still others recall arrangements in which the work was divided up and the completed parts were stapled together and turned in, with each team member knowing little or nothing about what any of the others did. Whatever else these students learned from their team experiences, they learned to avoid team projects whenever possible. Cooperative learning is an approach to groupwork that minimizes the occurrence of those unpleasant situations and maximizes the learning and satisfaction that result from working on a high-performance team. A large and rapidly growing body of research confirms the effectiveness of cooperative learning in higher education (1-4). Relative to students taught traditionally—i.e., with instructor-centered lectures, individual assignments, and competitive grading—cooperatively taught students tend to exhibit higher academic achievement, greater persistence through graduation, better high-level reasoning and critical thinking skills, deeper understanding of learned material, greater time on task and less disruptive behavior in class, lower levels of anxiety and stress, greater intrinsic motivation to learn and achieve, greater ability to view situations from others’ perspectives, more positive and supportive relationships with peers, more positive attitudes toward subject areas, and higher self-esteem. Another nontrivial benefit for instructors is that when assignments are done cooperatively, the number of papers to grade decreases by a factor of three or four. There are several reasons why cooperative learning works as well as it does. The idea that students learn more by doing something active than by simply watching and listening has long been known to both cognitive psychologists and effective teachers (5, 6) and cooperative learning is by its nature an active method. Beyond that, cooperation enhances learning in several ways. Weak students working individually are likely to give up when they get stuck; working cooperatively, they keep going. Strong students faced with the task of explaining and clarifying material to weaker students often find gaps in their own understanding and fill them in. Students working alone may tend to delay completing assignments or skip * P.A. Mabrouk, ed., Active Learning: Models from the Analytical Sciences, ACS Symposium Series 970, Chapter 4, pp. 34–53. Washington, DC: American Chemical Society, 2007. The term cooperative learning (CL) refers to students working in teams on an assignment or project under conditions in which certain criteria are satisfied, including that the team members be held individually accountable for the complete content of the assignment or project. This chapter summarizes the defining criteria of cooperative learning, surveys CL applications, summarizes the research base that attests to the effectiveness of the method, and outlines proven methods for implementing CL and overcoming common obstacles to its success.