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The widespread and increasing use of cooperative learning is one of the great success stories of social and educational psychology. Its success largely rests on the relationships among theory, research, and practice. Social interdependence theory provides a foundation on which cooperative learning is built. More than 1,200 research studies have been conducted in the past 11 decades on cooperative, competitive, and individualistic efforts. Findings from these studies have validated, modified, refined, and extended the theory. From the theory, procedures for the teacher's role in using formal and informal cooperative learning and cooperative base groups have been operationalized. Those procedures are widely used by educators throughout the world. The applications have resulted in revisions of the theory and the generation of new research.
Keywords: collaboration; cooperative learning; instructional practices
Few instructional practices have been more successfully implemented in the past 60 years than cooperative learning. Cooperative learning was relatively unknown and unused in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. During this time, there was considerable cultural resistance to the use of cooperative learning, based first on the social Darwinism that promoted interpersonal competition with slogans such as, "It's a dog-eat-dog world" and "survival of the fittest." In the late 1960s, after competition began to be criticized (e.g., Sexton, 1961), the cultural resistance switched to rugged individualism, that is, the view that strong individuals were built by isolating each student and having students learn by themselves without interacting with classmates. Individualistic procedures were recommended, such as programmed learning, which was aimed at allowing students to go through the curriculum at their own pace independent of classmates' rates of learning, and opérant conditioning, which included behavioral modification (Skinner, 1968). Individualistic learning was then challenged by social scientists who pointed out the essential role of peer interaction and relationships in socialization and learning (Hartup, 1976; D. W. Johnson, 1980; D. W. Johnson & R. Johnson, 1981d; Ladd, 1999; Lewis & Rosenblum, 1975). It was not until the 1980s that cooperative learning began to be widely accepted.
The application of social interdependence theory to education has become one of the most successful and widespread applications of social and educational psychology to practice. Although small-group learning has been used since the beginning of human existence, the modern use of...