32 A CONCISE GUIDE TO IMPROVING STUDENT LEARNING

Principle 5: Small Groups Engage Students

In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too)

those who learned to collaborate and improvise
most effectively have prevailed.
—Charles Darwin

Individual commitment to a group effort—that is

what makes a team work, a company work,
a society work, a civilization work.
—Vince Lombardi, head coach of the 1959–1967
Green Bay Packers

Hundreds of studies have found that students who were engaged in group work
displayed deeper learning, higher academic achievement with difficult assign-
ments, and increased student responsibility than students who worked alone
(Johnson, Johnson, & Smith, 1991, p. 98; Millis, 2010; Nilson, 2010, p. 156;
Prince, 2004; Wenzel, 2000). These studies used different methodologies and
included participants from different socioeconomic classes, ethnicities, and cul-
tural backgrounds. Although the results varied in statistical strength, the studies
indicated that when compared with students exposed to traditional means of
instruction, students who learned in small groups “exhibited better reasoning and
critical thinking skills, proposed more new ideas and solutions when presented
with problems, and transferred more of what they learned in prior situations to
new problems” (Wenzel, 2000, p. 295A). Moreover, engaged learning in group
work has been found to be successful in motivating female and minority students
to become involved in math and science (Johnson et al., 1991; Wenzel, 2000).
Group work is also called collaborative learning, cooperative learning,
and peer instruction. Since the late 1990s, medical schools and the sci-
ences have been using carefully designed team-learning methods, such as
PBL and POGIL. These structured methods are devised to teach both con-
tent and writing skills through collaboration, using an inquiry-based learn-
ing approach (Farrell, Moog, & Spencer, 1999). We have devoted Workshops
5.1 and 5.2 to exploring these topics because of their complexity.
Strategies for working in small groups do not have to be highly struc-
tured to be effective. Students can play a variety of roles in group work from
having specific responsibilities in more complex group assignments to sim-
ply partnering in a think-pair-share exercise. Think-pair-share (see p. 34,
this volume) is easy to implement and can quickly change the energy in
the room by getting everyone talking; moreover, it primes the pump for a