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. 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 them altogether, but when they know that others are counting on them, they are motivated to do the work in a timely manner.
Several definitions of cooperative learning have been formulated. The one most widely used in higher education is probably that of David and Roger Johnson of the University of Minnesota. According to the Johnson & Johnson model, cooperative learning is instruction that involves students working in teams to accomplish a common goal, under conditions that include the following elements:
1. Positive interdependence. Team members are obliged to rely on one another to achieve the goal.
If any team members fail to do their part, everyone suffers consequences.
2. Individual accountability. All students in a group are held accountable for doing their share of the work and for mastery of all of the material to be learned.
3. Face-to-face promotive interaction. Although some of the group work may be parcelled out and done individually, some must be done interactively, with group members providing one another with feedback, challenging reasoning and conclusions, and perhaps most importantly, teaching and encouraging one another.
4. Appropriate use of collaborative skills. Students are encouraged and helped to develop and practice trust-building, leadership, decision-making, communication, and conflict management skills.
5. Group processing. Team members set group goals, periodically assess what they are doing well
as a team, and identify changes they will make to function more effectively in the future.
Cooperative learning is appropriate to apply in nursing because cooperative learning 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.