The Definition of Cooperative Learning
on five elements namely prositive interdependence, individual accountabiliy, face-to-face interaction, social skills and group processing.
Meanwhile Slavin 1995 and his colleagues suggest the use of group reward to enhance students’ performance.
The five elements proposed by Johnson Johnson 1988 are all essential to all cooperative systems, no matter what their size.
1 Positive Interdependence
The teacher puts the students work in groups and work cooperatively. When the teacher gives a clear task and a group goal, the
students would learn how they sink or swim together. The students have to consider that they are one in a team, they will not succeed if there is one
students fails. Postive interdependence creates a commitment to others’ success as well as one’s own. It is the heart of cooperative learning as
there would be no cooperation if there is no positive interdependence.
2 Face to Face Interactions
The group member should share resources and help, support, encourage, and praise each other’s effort to learn. Cooperative learning
groups are both an academic support system and a personal support system. Academic support system is that every student has someone who is
comitted to help him or her to learn while personal support system means that every student has someone who is committed to him or her as a person.
During they work cooperatively, students orally explain how to solve
problems, discuss the nature of the concepts being learned, teach one’s knowledge classmates, and connect present with past learning.
3 Individual and Group Accountability
The teacher gives some goals that should be achieved by each group. Every member of the group should participate and contribute his or
her share of the work. the group has to be clear about its goals and be able to measure a its progress in achieving them and b the individual efforts
of each of its member. Individual accountability exists when the performance of each individual student is assessed and the results are
given back to the group and the individual in order to ascertain who needs more assitance, support and encouragement in completing the assignmnet.
The purpose of cooperative learning groups is to make each member a stronger individual in his or her right. Students should learn together so
that they can subsequently perform higher as individuals.
4 Social Skills
Students are asked to learn academic subject matter takswork and also to learn the interpersonal and small group skills required to function
as part of a group teamwork. Learning cooperatively is somewhat complex since the students are engaged in taskwork and teamwork.
Students working in groups must know how to provide effective leadership, decision-making, trust-builiding, communication, and conflict-
management, and be motivated to use the prerequisite skills.
5 Group Processing
Group members discuss how well they are achieveing their goals and maintaining effective working relationships. Each group need to
describe what member actions are helpful and unhelpful and make decisions about what behaviors to continue or change. Continuous
improvement of the process of learning results from the careful analysis of how members are working together.