Cooperative Learning: The Importance Of Cooperative Learning

Teachers look for ways of making learning a pleasant experience. They adopt different strategies to cater to the needs of their students and one of these many strategies is cooperative learning.

Johnson and Johnson (2016) give us a very comprehensive description of the nature of a cooperative task. Accordingly, constructive controversy theory posits that conflict among ideas, theories, or conclusions leads to uncertainty about the correctness of one’s views, which leads to epistemic curiosity and the active search for additional information and perspectives, which, in turn, leads to reconceptualized and refined conclusions. This process results in constructive outcomes when it occurs in a cooperative context, when students are skilled in

A very similar finding was shared by Zhang (2010) stating that cooperative language learning provides students with the necessary academic and social skills. Participation is enhanced by cooperative learning techniques (Drakeford, 2012). However, the teaching process in CL showed there were several shortcomings and difficulties, such as the dependence of lower achievers on higher achievers (Abdulahi, Hashim, & Kawo, 2017), the unified course schedule, and the difficulties of designing meaningful activities, managing noisy and chaotic classroom, grouping the students, facing attendance rate or distracted students and evaluating a vast of students’ test grades (Wang,

On the same year that Chen’s study was conducted, Fu (2013) also studied 58 college students majoring in computer science to find out in what ways do students behave differently in a co-operative learning classroom. His study revealed that in a co-operative learning class, the students become more confident in their English task than in a traditional class, which is due to the relaxed and co-operative environment and much autonomy and little pressure. Such finding on the role of CL in establishing a relaxed learning atmosphere was complimented when studies revealed that certain instructional techniques are more helpful than others in alleviating anxiety, including group work (McKnight and Redmond, 2003), and that CL proves to be a feasible and effective approach to alleviate learners’ writing anxiety significantly and increase their writing competence greatly (Jiang,