The purpose of this paper is to explore some results achieved in a teaching innovation project[1] carried out at the University of Seville. It was a four-month pilot project that aimed to integrate several elements in the teaching process, namely, academic literacy, cooperative learning and co-evaluation. All of them had been previously implemented in different subjects.

    This work focuses on cooperative learning (from now on CL). We have been working closely with CL in order to improve its implementation for several years with some groups of students belonging to different degrees (Primary and Early Childhood Education) and within subjects in the field of both first and second language teaching. To this end, we have been designing individual and team tasks. Gradually we have been increasing the number as well as the duration and demand of the cooperative tasks.

The experience described in this paper was implemented with undergraduate students of Early Childhood Education. One of our main objectives was to work on the concept of team with our students and to show them the numerous advantages of CL.

    There is a growing body of literature that recognises the importance of CL and many researchers confirm its effectiveness  (Johnson and Johnson, 1988; Stanne, 2000; Felder & Bent, 2007). Felder and Brent define CL as a term that “refers to students working in teams on an assignment or project under conditions in which certain criteria are satisfied, including that the team members be held individually accountable for the complete content of the assignment or project” (2007:34). To better understand the research theory and its possible applications, Johnson and Johnson (1988) stated certain conditions under which CL could be more productive. These conditions were: Positive Interdependence, Face-to-Face Promotive Interaction, Individual Accountability, Interpersonal and Small Groups Skills and Grouping Processing. After years of implementation, Kagan and Kagan (2009) proposed four basic principles for the success of CL. They recognized Positive Interdependence and Individual Accountability and developed two additional ones closely related to the conditions set up by Johnson and Johnson: Equal Participation and Simultaneous Interaction. Another objective of our project was to implement CL following these principles and determine whether its success depends upon doing so.

    CL is particularly useful in promoting higher academic achievements, better high-level reasoning and critical thinking skills, and better development of interpersonal and social skills. Thus, the advantages of using CL have a cognitive as well as a social dimension. For instance, Coll (1985) describes the kind of knowledge (not only conceptual) and the cognitive and social development that interaction within cooperative groups produces.

    From the different goal structures described by Johnson and Johnson (1978) we decided on combining cooperative and individualistic structures since we consider that our students as future teachers should learn how and when to use each of them depending on the nature of the task they want to design. Regarding the basic models of CL stated by Johnson and Johnson (1975) we carried out our implementation using the “Learning Together” model.

[1] Teacher Training: Development of Academic Literacy through Cooperative Learning and Coevaluation in Early Chilhood Education.

Coll, C. (1985). “Acción, interacción y construcción del conocimiento en situaciones educativas”. Anuario de Psicología, 33. Felder, R. & Brent, R. (2007). Cooperative Learning. In P.A. Mabrouk (Ed.), Active Learning: Models from the Analytical Sciences (ACS Symposium Series 970, Chapter 4, pp. 34–53). Washington, DC: American Chemical Society. Johnson, D. W. & Johnson, R. T. (1975). Learning Together and Alone: Cooperative, Competitive, and Individualistic Learning (1st ed.). Englewood Cliffs, Nueva Jersey: Prentice-Hall. Johnson, D. W. & Johnson, R. T. (1978). Cooperative, Competitive, and Individualistic Learning. Journal of Research & Development in Education, 12 (1), 3-15. Johnson, D. W. & Johnson, R. T. (1988). Advanced Cooperative Learning). Minnesota: Holubec. Johnson, D. W., Johnson, R. T., Stanne, M. E. (2000). Cooperative Learning Methods: A Meta-analysis. http://www.ccsstl.com/sites/default/files/Cooperative%20Learning%20Research%20.pdf (accessed September 9, 2014). Kagan, S. & Kagan, M. (2009). Kagan Cooperative Learning. San Clemente, CA: Kagan Publishing, cop.