Chapter 10: The Effectiveness of Cooperative Activities in Promoting Individual Learning

In this chapter, we review recent empirical research on cooperative learning methods for teacher educators whose preservice teachers would benefit from having this immense field of research summarized into “what works.” We survey cooperative learning (CL) methods that have been shown to be effective in promoting learning in classroom settings, and attempt to identify essential components or techniques that can be linked to the effectiveness of these CL methods by empirical evidence and by underlying psychological and educational theory. Our hope is to show how these techniques, specifically ways of imposing structure on group work, might be used in creative new ways to design novel, effective cooperative classroom activities for preservice teachers, activities that they might apply in their own future classrooms. We conclude by summarizing and addressing some major challenges and questions that preservice teachers tend to face in the field when implementing CL methods.