Cooperative Learning: Where Behavioral and Humanistic Approaches to Classroom Motivation Meet

This article discusses behavioral and humanistic perspectives on cooperative learning. In the behavioral view, cooperative learning is a form of group contingencies, because it rewards students on the basis of the performance of their group. The humanistic view emphasizes understandings arising from peer interactions. However, group contingencies have more often been applied to behavior than to learning, and research on peer interaction per se finds few achievement benefits. Rather, it is the combination of group rewards (based on group members' individual learning) and peer interaction on learning tasks that is necessary to produce the learning gains characteristic of effective cooperative learning methods. Of 35 studies of cooperative learning methods that used group rewards based on the sum of group members' individual learning, 30 found significantly greater achievement for cooperative than for control classes, and 5 found no differences. In contrast, of 20 studies of cooperative learning methods lacking group rewards based on group members' learning, only 3 favored the cooperative classes, and 2 favored control groups. These and other findings are discussed in an attempt to reconcile the behavioral perspective with other perspectives on cooperative learning.