A collaborative (or cooperative) learning approach involves students working together on activities or learning tasks in a group small enough to ensure that everyone participates. Students in the group may work on separate tasks contributing to a common overall outcome, or work together on a shared task. This is distinct from unstructured group work.

Some collaborative learning approaches put pairs, groups or teams of mixed achievement to work in competition with each other in order to drive more effective collaboration. There is a very wide range of approaches to collaborative and cooperative learning involving many different kinds of organisation and tasks. Peer tutoring can also be considered as a type of collaborative learning, but is reviewed as a separate topic in the Toolkit.

1. Collaborative learning approaches have a positive impact, on average, and may be a cost-effective approach for raising achievement.

2. Students need support and practice to work together; it does not happen automatically. Professional development can support the effective management of collaborative learning activities.

3. Tasks and activities need to be designed carefully so that working together is effective and efficient, otherwise some students may struggle to participate or try to work on their own. It is important to ensure that all students talk and articulate their thinking in collaborative tasks to ensure they benefit fully.

4. Competition between groups can be used to support students in working together more effectively. However, overemphasis on competition can cause learners to focus on winning rather than succeeding in their learning.

5. The most promising collaborative learning approaches tend to have group sizes between 3 and 5 students and have a shared outcome or goal.

The impact of collaborative approaches on learning is consistently positive, with students making an additional 5 months’ progress, on average, over the course of an academic year. However, the size of impact varies, so it is important to get the detail right.

Collaborative learning can describe a large variety of approaches, but effective collaborative learning requires much more than just sitting students together and asking them to work in pairs or group; structured approaches with well-designed tasks lead to the greatest learning gains.

There is some evidence that collaboration can be supported with competition between groups, but this is not always necessary, and can lead to students focusing on the competition rather than the learning it aims to support. Most of the positive approaches include the promotion of talk and interaction between students.

The evidence indicates that groups of 3 – 5 is most effective for collaborative learning approaches – there are smaller positive impacts for both paired work and collaborative learning activities with more than 5 students in a group. There is also some evidence that collaborative learning approaches are particularly promising when used to teach science.

When groups conducting collaborative learning activities are given a joint group outcome to work towards, the impact of the approach is typically higher than average.

111 studies were identified in which students work towards a joint outcome.

Some collaborative learning activities give different children within the group different objectives to accomplish. These approaches have positive outcomes, overall, but the impact is typically slightly lower than approaches with shared group outcomes.

101 studies were identified in which individual outcomes were given to students within collaborative learning activities.

There are many theories about how collaborative learning might benefit student outcomes. Through collaboration, students may develop explanation, demonstration, problem-solving, and metacognitive skills, or students may benefit from sharing the load of challenging tasks. It is important that schools ensure that within collaborative learning:

• all students, particularly students with low prior achievement, are supported to fully participate.
• the make-up of pairings and groups is carefully considered.
• teachers promote good practice in collaboration – for example modelling high quality discussions so that collaborative activities are productive.

teachers carefully monitor collaborative activities and support students that are struggling or not contributing.

There is a broad range of approaches to collaborative or cooperative learning involving different kinds of organisation and tasks across the curriculum. Not all of the specific approaches to collaborative learning adopted by schools have been evaluated, so it is important to evaluate any new initiative in this area. Professional development is likely to be required to maximise the effectiveness of approaches and monitor the impact of different approaches in the classroom.

The average cost of collaborative learning is expected to be very low with the cost to schools largely based on teacher training and resources. As a classroom-based approach, implementing collaborative learning will also require a small amount of staff time for planning and monitoring, compared with other approaches.

Alongside time and cost, school leaders should consider how to maximise the effectiveness of collaborative learning through teacher professional development to support the use of well-designed tasks and should carefully monitor the impact of approaches on lower-achieving students.