activities “move away from rote learning strategies and more
toward meaningful strategies.”18 Likewise, in her assessment of
the effect of collaborative groups on students’ problem solving
strategies, Cooper found that students who participated in
collaborative work developed improved problem solving
strategies that they continued to employ when they worked
individually.19 Cooperative learning was previously applied to
NMR spectroscopy and was reported to improve student
achievement on exams.14 In some cases, cooperative online
learning offers a more feasible alternative to in-class
implementation, and several investigations of utilizing online
environments to promote collaborative learning in the context
of chemistry have been reported.