Effectiveness of Cooperative Learning

One of the main assumptions in my project is that cooperative learning improves learning as a whole. However, I had yet to find research that actually supported that assumption. Thanks to one of my acquaintances, Fanny, I managed to get my hands on a couple of good papers.

The best result I got from this is a good research question:

How can cooperative learning on tablets encourage students to ask and give help to others?

Some fast concepts for collaboration

I made some scenario’s about two quick concepts that I came up with for collaboration on tablets. They both follow these assumptions:

• Students read their textbooks or make their assignments on their tablet.
• Every students that is following a current course is connected through the system.

Read along for my two concepts: proximity collaboration and note collaboration.

Why tablets?

A question that often pops up when I talk about my graduation project, is why tablets would work better in education than other platforms. Especially educators themselves are really skeptical, since they either doubt the effectiveness of absorbing knowledge that comes digitally, or because they are anxious about another piece of technology forcing its way into the education market.

Both are valid concerns, so I’ll address the second now. Why would you use tablets in education instead of, say, interactive whiteboards, Microsoft Surface tables, laptops or smart phones? What makes a tablet so significantly different from these technologies that it would be worthwhile to use it in education?

Types of software in education

In an effort to figure out what kind of software is prevalent in education, I looked around trying to find examples and categorizing them. What I came up with are seven categories that represent the most typical applications.

Educational software can roughly be split up in seven categories: study material, games, reference, organization and planning, practice, creativity, collaboration and cooperation.

My graduation blog

This may come somewhat late, as I’ve already been graduating for a month, but I’ve finally started my graduation blog. The idea is to create a sort of open diary, where I can write about my progress every couple of days. Why a blog? Well, it’s an easy way for my mentors and chair to keep track of my project. And it provides me with a means of keeping other people in the loop as well and hopefully gain some extra insights from them along the way.