ABSTRACT
Research into children's behavior in groups and their productivity was pioneered at the University of Iowa's Child Welfare Research Station toward the end of the 1930s. Working under the direction of Kurt
5 Lewin, an acclaimed experimental psychologist, graduate students Ronald Lippitt and Ralph White undertook a series of experiments in 1938 to investigate how children worked together in groups (Marrow, 1965). Participants chosen for the studies were 20 children who
10 met after school to make papier mache masks and to engage in other play activities. The children were divided into three groups, two of which were directed by an adult; each child was rotated through each of the three groups. The results of the experiments proved
15 remarkable. Researchers found that children in an autocratically led group seemed discontented, often aggressive, and lacking in initiative. Youngsters in groups without a leader experienced similar problems: members appeared frustrated, and much of the work
20 remained unfinished. In marked contrast, children in groups organized with a democratic leader-someone who allowed the group to set its own agendas and priorities-appeared far more productive, socially satisfied, and demonstrated greater originality and inde-
25 pendence in the work they completed. Although the Iowa studies excited the educational
community, the advent of World War 11-and its af-
termath-greatly interrupted research into how children behaved and learned in groups. Scholarly atten-
30 tion did not again turn toward efforts to understand children's behavior and learning in groups until the 1970s (Slavin, 1991). Since that time, researchers have come to agree that cooperative and collaborative learning are valuable components of classroom learning
35 (Blumenfeld, Marx, Soloway, & Krajcik, 1996; Gamson, 1994; Kohn, 1991; Webb, Troper, & Fall, 1995), and children are often instructed to "work together" at school (Gamson, 1994; Patrick, 1994; Wood & Jones, 1994). Slavin (1991, p. 71) stated that cooperative
40 learning has been promoted as a solution to "an astonishing array of educational problems" and has been endorsed as a learning strategy by numerous researchers (Burron, James, & Ambrosio, 1993; Wood & Jones, 1994) who have investigated its effects on student
45 achievement (Slavin), as well as on the contexts and ways in which children work together in classrooms (Keedy & Drmacich, 1994).
