Collaborative groupwork: How infant children can manage it

Peer mediation and the cooperative school

“…Both views are optimistic about the benefits to be gained from modern systems of cooperative decision making. Cooperative group learning is championed by many (eg Bennett and Dunne, 1992) even for very young learners (Horbury and Pears, 1994), and defended against attacks from those politicians who see it as distracting teachers from taking proper responsibility for their pupils' learning (eg Sylva, 1994). Equally, recent experiments with pupil collaboration in the resolution of social conflicts show gains within the social arenas of school life equivalent to those discovered through peer tutoring and cooperative group learning.…”

Bridging the Gaps Between Students' Perceptions of Group Project Work and Their Teachers' Expectations

“…For example, in the United States, a national survey reported that the majority of elementary and middle school teachers used cooperative learning in their classes (Puma, Jones, Rock, & Fernandez, 1993). Likewise, in the United Kingdom, the introduction of the National Curriculum in the late 1980s brought a requirement for group work to be a more salient feature in primary schools (Horbury & Pears, 1994). In other European nations, cooperative learning programs have also been widely used.…”

“…For instance, there is frequently a mismatch between teachers' expectations of students' performance during PW and students' perceptions of their own achievements. For example, Dunne and Bennett (1990) and Horbury and Pears (1994) have found that, although students were expected to work collaboratively as groups, most of them were, in fact, merely working in groups. Whereas administrators and teachers expected students to work as groups by engaging in purposeful discussion, listening to one another, and sharing and evaluating ideas, many students thought of group work mainly as a means of getting the task done more quickly by getting in groups and collating the contributions of each group member working individually on different aspects of the task.…”