Improving Social-Environmental Studies Problem Solving Through Cooperative Learning

Previous investigators have found that cooperative learning group ap-proaches to instruction are substantially more effective than methods with competitive or individualistic reward systems in the achievement of com-putational and recall objectives. The findings for higher order objectives are less clear. Two instructional field experiments were conducted to compare the effects of a cooperative learning group method (Slavin 's Student Teams Achievement Divisions) to a whole-class method on the acquisition of selected social-environmental studies problem-solving skills by grade 4 students. The results showed that both methods outperformed the control and that the cooperative strategy was slightly less effective than the whole-class approach