Cooperative Learning in Higher Education: Across the Disciplines, Across the Academy

This book provides an ideal introduction for faculty contemplating using cooperative learning approaches in his or her classes. If you’ve been interested in cooperative learning, but wondered how it would work in your discipline, this book will show you. A series of chapters written by experienced users of cooperative learning provide concrete examples of practice in settings as varied as a developmental mathematics course at a community college, graduate courses in history and the sciences, in small and large classes as well as in hybrid and online environments. The chapters showcase cooperative learning as it’s practiced while introducing the reader to major principles such as individual accountability, positive interdependence, heterogeneous teams, group processing, and social or leadership skills. The chapters build upon, and cross-reference, each other, describing particular methods and activities in detail. They explain how and why the authors may differ about specific practices while exemplifying reflective approaches to teaching that never fail to address important assessment issues. The authors describe the application of cooperative learning in disciplines as varied as biology, economics, educational psychology, financial accounting, general chemistry, and literature - and in settings as varied as remedial, introductory, graduate, and research methods and statistics, classes. Readers will find useful support for whatever level they teach, and whatever their academic discipline. Grounded in the belief that ideas come alive best in genuine contexts, the book moves cooperative learning from theory to practice through the best of all means - concrete examples.