Cooperative Learning and
College Teaching Newsletter, 5 (2), 10–13 (1995)
COOPERATIVE LEARNING
IN A SEQUENCE OF
ENGINEERING COURSES: A
SUCCESS STORY
Richard M. Felder
Hoechst Celanese
Professor of Chemical Engineering
As part of an ongoing longitudinal study of
engineering education, I taught five chemical engineering courses in successive
semesters to roughly the same body of students, beginning with the introductory
course on chemical process principles (CHE 205) and ending with a senior course
in chemical reactor design. The basis for the instructional approach in all
five courses was the cooperative learning model articulated by Johnson,
Johnson, and Smith, with most deviations from their recommendations being due
primarily to my inexperience and/or timidity. The narrative that follows
summarizes what I did and how it worked.
CL FORMAT AND RULES
In every course in the sequence,
homework assignments were done by fixed teams of three or four students that
with few exceptions remained together for an entire semester. The homework consisted of a mixture of standard quantitative
problems, problems that called for verbal explanations of physical phenomena,
brainstorming exercises, and occasional problem-formulation exercises. (Make up a nontrivial problem related to the
material in Chapter 6 of your text. Make up a problem that involves what we
covered this week and what was covered this month in your organic chemistry
class.) The average homework grade counted for about 15% of the final
course grade, most of which was determined by grades on individual tests and
the final examination. Students who managed to freeload on the homework despite
my safeguards against freeloading generally crashed and burned in the course.
I used in-class group exercises in
every class period, varying them so that the students never knew what was
coming next. Sometimes I would ask the same kind of question I would normally
address to the whole class during a lecture. (What procedure could I use here? Is what I just said correct?) I
might pose a problem and ask the class to outline a solution strategy, estimate
the solution or guess what it should look like, get started on the solution
procedure and see how far they could get in three minutes, fill in a missing
step, or figure out a way to check the answer. I might ask for jargon-free
explanations of course concepts. (Explain
in terms a bright high school senior could understand the concept of relative
humidity. Explain, in terms of
concepts you learned in this course, why you feel comfortable in 65oF air and freezing in 65oF water.) Sometimes I asked them to generate questions about
material just covered, and at other times I had them write and hand in
one-minute papers at the end of a class. (List
the major point in the material we covered today. Then list the muddiest point.)
I also varied the structure of the
in-class exercises, sometimes jumping directly into groups, sometimes doing
think-pair-shares, and occasionally having pairs work through critical
derivations or examples from their text using a TAPPS
(thinking-aloud-pair-problem-solving) format. The level of active student
involvement in these exercises generally varied between 90 and 100 percent,
which is not bad considering that the class size ranged from a high of 125 in
the first semester to a low of 90 in the last. (The previous paragraph and this
one comprise my response when anyone asks me in a workshop or seminar how they
can teach large classes effectively.)
I tried to do a variety of things to
help the students learn to function effectively in groups. I regularly required
them to summarize in writing what they were doing well as a team, what their
problems were, and what if anything they planned to do differently in the
future. I advised them and periodically reminded them to set up all assigned
problems individually (no detailed mathematical or numerical calculations) and
then meet as a group to put the complete solution set together. I warned them
about the dangers of one or two students working all the solutions out and then
quickly explaining them to teammates who didn’t really participate in obtaining
them. (This message did not get through to some students until after they
flunked the first test.)
I admonished the students not to put
a nonparticipating member’s name on a solution set, especially if it happened
with the same student more than once. I invited teams having serious problems
to meet with me to talk things over. Finally, I announced that a team by
unanimous consent could fire a chronically non-cooperative member and a team
member who constantly had to do most of the work could quit, both options being
available only if repeated attempts to correct the problem had failed. Fired
students or students who quit had to find teams of three willing to accept
them, or else they would get zeros on the remaining homework assignments. Teams
almost invariably found ways of working things out before either of those
last-resort options was exercised.
The narrative that follows might
give professors of technical subjects like engineering, science, and
mathematics an idea of what might happen if they try CL on students who have
not experienced it before.
CHRONOLOGY
First day of CHE 205: Setting the stage. I announced that all homework must be done in fixed
groups with one solution set handed in per group, gave the criteria for group
formation (three or four members, no more than one of whom could have received
A’s in specified mathematics and physics courses), and specified individual
roles within groups—coordinator, recorder, and one or two checkers, with the
roles rotating on each assignment.
I spent some time explaining why I
was doing all this, assuring the students that it wasn’t just a game I was
playing with them or something I designed to make my life easier (quite the
contrary). I told them that both educational research and my experience
indicated that students learn better and get higher grades by teaching one
another some of the time rather than listening to professors lecture all of the
time. I also guaranteed them that when they went to work as engineers they
would be expected to work in teams, so they might as well start learning how to
do it now. During the next two days, several students expressed strong
reservations about group work and requested permission to work alone. Permission
was denied.
Second day of CHE 205: Introduction to
group work. I interspersed small
group problem-solving exercises throughout my lecture. The student response was
variable—the level of interaction generally decreased with distance from the
front of the room. At the end of the period, I asked students who had not yet
affiliated with homework teams to get together after class with teams of three
willing to pick up a fourth member and work things out, which they did.
First homework assignment: Resistance
to group work. Assignments were
turned in by most students working in groups as instructed, but also by several
individuals and one “group” consisting of the student, Elvis Presley, and
Richard M. Nixon. I applauded that student for creativity but informed all
those who had not yet joined a group that the fun was over and I would accept
no further assignments from individuals. By the due date of the second assignment,
all students were in homework groups.
Facilitating effective team
functioning. I periodically included
group self-assessment questions on homework assignments, and sometimes in class
I offered suggestions for effective homework team functioning, trying not to be
too preachy about it. I occasionally got complaints in my office about team
members not pulling their weight or missing group sessions, or about personal
conflicts between group members, and I met with several groups in my office
during the semester to help them work out solutions. (In the end, only one
group actually dissolved out of roughly 35 groups in the class.) Dropouts
during this period brought some groups down to two members. Some pairs
combined, others disbanded and individually joined teams of three. (In
subsequent courses, I allowed some pairs to remain intact if dropouts occurred
late in the semester.)
First test results. The class average on the first test was 66, brought
down by some very low grades (as low as 10). Some students complained that the
better members of their groups had been working out most of the homework
solutions and the complaining students were consequently hurt on the test. I
announced in class that students doing all the work in their teams were hurting
their classmates rather than helping them, and I repeated the message about
setting up problems individually and completing them in groups. The students
who had complained soon afterward reported improved interactions within their
groups.
Midsemester evaluations. The students were overwhelmingly positive about
group work. Almost on a whim, I announced that students who wished to do so
could now do homework individually. Out of roughly 115 students remaining in
the course, only three elected to do so, two of whom were off-campus students
who were finding it difficult to attend group work sessions. In subsequent
courses I occasionally assigned individual homework but never again let the
students opt out of assigned group work.
Last half of CHE 205: Growth in class
cohesiveness, problem-solving skills, and self-reliance. The student lounge began to resemble an ant colony
the day before an assignment was due, with small groups clustered everywhere,
occasionally sending out emissaries to other groups to compare notes and
exchange hints (which I permitted as long as entire solutions were not
exchanged). Homework grades were almost invariably in the 90’s, and many
students began to do outstanding work on problems that called for creativity
and higher level thinking skills. The nature of my office hours changed
considerably from the start of the semester, with fewer individual students
coming in to ask “How do you do Problem 3” and more groups coming in for help
in resolving debates about open-ended problems. I inferred with considerable
satisfaction that the students had begun to count on one another to resolve
straightforward questions instead of looking to me as the source of all wisdom.
The final grade distribution in CHE
205 was dramatically different from any I had ever seen when I taught this
course before. In the previous offerings, the distribution was reasonably
bell-shaped, with more students earning C’s than any other grade. When the
course was taught cooperatively, the number of failures was comparable to the
number in previous offerings but the overall distribution was markedly skewed
toward higher grades: 26 A’s, 40 B’s, 15 C’s, 11 D’s, and 26 F’s. Many of those
who failed had quit before the end of the course. The course evaluations were
exceptionally high and most students made strong statements about how much the
group work improved their understanding of the course material. My conclusion
was that CL led to improved learning in all but the least qualified and most
poorly motivated students.
Remaining courses: At my encouragement, new teams formed at the
beginning of each semester, even when all members of a team from the previous
semester remained in the sequence. I continued to ask the teams to assess their
performance periodically and to meet with me if they had persistent problems. The
students’ level of comfort with cooperative learning continually increased,
although there were always problems that needed attention. No more than two
teams in any semester had recourse to the last-resort options of firing or
quitting.
“Can you do all this stuff and still
cover the syllabus?”
When I give teaching workshops and
talk about cooperative learning, an inevitable question has to do whether doing
group work cuts down on the amount of material that can be covered in a course.
I have several responses, but the principal one is to describe what I did in
the experimental sequence. In all courses but the first one I put my notes in coursepacks which the students got on Day 1. The notes had
gaps to be filled in and frequent questions like “Where did this figure come from?” and “How do you get from Eq. (4) to Eq. (5)” and requests like “Verify this result.” and “Convince yourself.” I promised the
students that some of these missing pieces would show up on the tests and I
kept my promise, so that—especially after the first test—most of the students
actually read the notes. As a consequence of using these handouts, I saved
untold hours of class time that would have been wasted on writing detailed
derivations and prose on the board and instead used those hours for active
learning exercises. By their own estimation and mine, the students learned far
more from the exercises than they would have from the stenography, and I ended
up covering more material in each
course than I had gotten through when all I did was lecture.
EVALUATION
Several times during the
experimental course sequence the students were asked to rate how helpful
cooperative learning was to them. Their ratings of group homework were
consistently and overwhelmingly positive. At the midpoints of the introductory
sophomore course, the two junior courses, and the senior course, the
percentages rating CL above average in helpfulness were respectively 83%, 85%,
87%, and 86%, and the percentages rating it below average were 9%, 7%, 7%, and
7%. The ratings of in-class group exercises were also positive, but it took
many of the students longer to appreciate the benefits of these exercises. Above–average
ratings were given by 41%, 70%, and 86% of the respondents in the two junior
courses and the senior course, and below–average ratings were given by 24%,
12%, and 6%, respectively.
In the semester following the
experimental course sequence, the students were asked to evaluate the sequence
retrospectively. Of 67 seniors responding, 92% rated the experimental courses
more instructive than their other chemical engineering courses, 8% rated them
equally instructive, and none rated them less instructive. Ninety-eight percent
rated group homework helpful and 2% rated it not helpful, and 78% rated
in-class group work helpful and 22% rated it not helpful. Women generally gave
CL higher ratings than men, but they were also more likely to complain that
their ideas were devalued or discounted within their groups and they tended to
take less active roles in group discussions. Gender differences in CL groups
are discussed in greater detail in the final bibliography reference.
Of the students who took the
introductory course as sophomores in the Fall of 1990,
roughly 80% had either graduated or were still enrolled in chemical engineering
after their fourth year of college, a retention rate significantly higher than
normal in this major. (We are currently generating precise comparisons.) Sixty
percent of the seniors considered the experimental courses very important
factors in their decision to remain in chemical engineering, 28% considered
them important, and 12% rated them not very important or unimportant.
My own observations corroborated the
students’ opinion that cooperative learning had improved their educational
experience. For one thing, they came to class regularly: attendance on any
given day was normally 90% or better, which is far from what we usually see in
lecture classes of the size I was teaching. They tended to do better on tests
than any other class I ever taught, even though the tests called on them to
exercise a greater variety of thinking and problem-solving skills than any I
had previously given. I also observed a greater sense of community in this
cohort of students than I had seen in any other chemical engineering class in
my 25 years in the profession. Almost from the outset of the study, they worked
together, partied together, and displayed a remarkable sense of unanimity in
complaining about things in the chemical engineering program that they didn’t
like. One student commented, “This class
is different from any I’ve been in before. Usually you just end up knowing a
couple of people—here I know everyone in the class. Working in groups does
this.”
One episode in particular led me to
believe that group work was having the desired effect on the students’
intellectual development. In the third semester of the study, the class was
taking fluid dynamics and heat transfer with me and thermodynamics with a colleague.
My colleague is a traditional instructor, relying entirely on lecturing to
impart the course material, and he is known for his long and difficult tests,
with averages in the 50’s or even less not unheard of. The average on his first
test that semester was 72, and that on the second test was 78, and he ended by
concluding that it was perhaps the strongest class he had ever taught. Meanwhile,
I casually asked the students how things were going, mentioning that I heard
they were doing well in thermo. Several of them independently told me that they
had become so used to working in groups, meeting before my tests, speculating
on what I might be likely to ask, and figuring out how they would respond, that
they just kept doing it in their other classes—and it worked!
Moving to CL is not an easy step for
professors of technical subjects (or any other subjects, for that matter). They
have to deal with the fact that while they are learning to implement CL they
will make mistakes and may for a time be less effective
than they were using more familiar teacher-centered methods. They may also have
to confront and overcome substantial student opposition and resistance, which
can be a most unpleasant experience, especially for teachers who are good
lecturers and may have been popular with students for many years.
The message of this report, if there
is a single message, is that the benefits of cooperative learning more than
compensate for the difficulties that must be overcome to implement it. Instructors
who pay attention to CL principles when designing their courses, who are
prepared for initially negative student reactions, and who have the patience
and the confidence to wait out these reactions, will reap their rewards in more
and deeper student learning and more positive student attitudes toward their
subjects and toward themselves. It may take an effort to get there, but it is
an effort well worth making.
EPILOGUE: WHAT DO I DO DIFFERENTLY NOW?
When I began the study, I was fairly
low on the CL learning curve. I still use it extensively in every class I
teach, but I do some things differently than I did in the longitudinal study,
in part because of what the study taught me. I now form groups myself rather than letting the students self-select. On the
first day of class I circulate a questionnaire asking for grades in selected
prerequisite courses, sex, race, interests, and times available for group work
outside class, and I form groups that are heterogeneous in ability (as measured
by those grades) and share common interests and possible meeting times. I also
try to avoid groups in which women are outnumbered by men and ethnic minorities
are outnumbered by white students; my study data and the literature suggest the
gender policy and the ethnic policy is my extrapolation of those results. I
discuss the rationale for CL up front more than I used to, using a variety of
sales pitches that I have found effective for engineering students. Finally, I
have increased the frequency of group self-monitoring exercises, finding that
the more frequently problems are placed on the table,
the less likely they will be to explode into crises.