Structuring Groups for Cooperative Learning

The college classroom is first and foremost a scene of recurrent interper-sonal interactions where an instructor and 30 to 50 or more students all interact with one another. College faculty have traditionally viewed the in-teraction between the instructor and student and between the student and materials as the two most important sources of subject matter mastery, pro-fessional socialization, and intellectual and social development. As a result, considerable attention has been focused on the effects of the instructor’s behavior on student learning. For example, studies have investigated such things as instructors ’ expectations of students ’ ability to perform on academic tasks, warmth, empathy, and democraticness in dealing with students, distribution of reinforcers to students for achievement and ap-propriate social behavior, and feedback to the student concerning achieve-ment and appropriate behavior. Similarly a great deal of attention has been directed toward constructing instructional materials that promote learning. For example, effective instructional materials are attractive in appearance,