Progress in Practice: Exploring the Cooperative and Collaborative Dimensions of Group Learning

Abstract

We all participate in a variety of groups as part of our daily lives, from families to social and work communities. As chemists, we are part of our college departments, our professional societies, our research groups, and so on. In graduate and undergraduate school, some of us formed peer study groups in response to the demands of those other groups that we were a part of: our formal courses. We know we are not unique in this. The popular culture, at least, is filled with portrayals of medical, law, and business students who must divide responsibility for learning a daunting amount of course material and who then teach one another as a part of their learning. Graduate research groups in chemistry are generally highly structured by their research directors where community issues are involved (group meetings and assignments, shared equipment, and representatives who obtain specialized skills such as crystallography or mass spectrometry), and move towards a less authoritative structure when developing individual initiative is the goal. Individuals depend on (and learn with) one another in all kinds of educational situations. In order to emphasize this idea, Bruffee [1] advocates the use of a phrase attributed to John Dewey: “living an associated life.” As Bruffee describes it, formal education in America has been based on a philosophy of associated learning since at least the time of Benjamin Franklin. We all live and learn in an associated way. Differences in interactions vary according to the nature of a group’s structure (and sometimes, although not as often, to an individual’s degree of dissociation from the group).