A Quantitative Literature Review of Cooperative Learning Effects on High School and College Chemistry Achievement

This paper has two purposes. First, the reader is given an overview on how quantitative literature reviews (meta-analyses) can be conducted to give overall estimates of the quantitative impact an instructional treatment has on a specific student outcome. The second purpose is to illustrate how such a literature review is carried out by examining studies on using cooperative learning to teach chemistry at the high school and college levels. This analysis extends earlier reported work on effects of cooperative learning on achievement in college-level science, mathematics, and engineering and technology (SMET) courses. The analysis shows that while median student performance in a traditional course is at the 50th percentile, the median student performance in a cooperative learning environment is 14 percentile points higher.