Reports on a study of 86 undergraduate students working in dyads in five sections of elementary education. States that students felt more pride when they perceived their ability as higher than their partner's, and had higher expectations for future success when they perceived their partner as more able. (Contains four tables and seven references.)…

Working cooperatively in groups can help students connect learning with experience and build relationships at the same time. In collaborative inquiry, student questions can connect the big ideas that cut across disciplines. This paper describes how collaboration promotes social skills and a sense of partnership; discusses the appropriate learning…

Investigated characteristics of cooperative learning (CL) lessons among experienced elementary school teachers. Found considerable variation in the extent to which lessons incorporated major features of CL. Lesson success based on student engagement, performance, and cooperation was associated with higher levels of individual or group…

Discusses the value of mentoring to help African-American education students taking educational media and technology classes to have more confidence in their abilities to integrate technology into the classroom. Highlights include students' prior use of technology; and modeling the use of technology, including acknowledging their anxiety and…

Described is a team assignment where groups of students work on stoichiometry problems that apply to the real world. Teams of students act as chemical companies that have orders to fill for a customer. Included are the details of the customer order, student participation, and the evaluation procedure. (KR)

Data are presented from a study of cooperative learning as a teaching strategy in teacher education courses. Two university methods courses were restructured to incorporate learning teams and interactive practice activities. Results indicated that students who had difficulty mastering specific content performed better with cooperative learning…

Discussion of cooperative learning focuses on the benefits of using computers. Research that explored benefits of group versus individual computer use is reviewed, size of computer groups is discussed, differentiating tasks to accommodate individual differences is considered, and a cooperative computer project for a newswriting unit for fourth…

Presents a 33-item annotated bibliography of articles and books in 6 areas essential for both novice instructors and those experienced in assigning collaborative writing: (1) research implications; (2) theoretical foundations; (3) cooperative learning; (4) small group dynamics; (5) pedagogical practices; and (6) textbooks. (RS)

A project in which students can develop their understanding of mathematical concepts through the collaborative writing of word problems is discussed. Worksheets for project requirements and daily requirements are provided. A Thanksgiving project is proposed. The use of a fashion modeling problem in the statistics classroom is described. (CW)

Answers questions about collaborative learning and offers some strategies to use with students. (MG)

Offers a view of writing as a process involving three forms of collaboration: coauthoring, workshopping, and knowledge making. Offers guidelines for designing courses in which writing is consciously, deliberately collaborative in all three of the realms identified. (MG)

A project at Loyola University of Chicago and Northwestern University has three teams of two students each write papers and present them at a joint meeting. One team from a university writes in support of a particular side, while its counterpart at the other university takes the opposite view. (MLW)

Described is an approach to the teaching of thinking and problem-solving for gifted and regular education students, based on R.J. Sternberg's "Suggested Criteria for the Development of Thinking Skills Programmes." The program provides specific skills training and ample practice, emphasizes cooperative learning and motivation, and…

The Learning Enrichment Service encourages development of gifted adolescents as co-learners, offering screening, training, counseling, networking, and information exchange to four learning environments (specialized programs, enrichment talent pool, community resources pool, and regular classrooms). The Mentor Academy Program is a skill-based model…

Student performance will continue to drop as long as traditional school management telegraphs the message that low-quality work is acceptable. Nothing of high quality, including school work, can be measured by standardized machine-scored tests. By using control theory, both student and teacher workers can be more effectively managed without…