101 Reasons for Using Cooperative Learning in Biology Teaching

OVER the last few decades, there have beennumerous studies supporting or repudiatingcooperative learning as an effective means of instructing high school and college students. The promoters of cooperative learning champion such studies as McKeachie (1988), Slavin (1987), and John-son and Johnson and Smith (1991) that state when small teams work together to solve challenges in a student-centered fashion, they not only understand the information better but they retain it for a much longer period of time than they do with teacher-centered instruction. The opponents of cooperative learning point to studies by Collins (1970), Langer & Beneventi (1978) and Hill (1982) that indicate that cooperative learning is too time-consuming, too diffuse in responsibility, and too informal to bring about high level learning of complicated material