Manipulating Cooperative Scripts for Teaching and Learning

To facilitate their initial acquisition of knowledge from text material, we paired students with same-sex partners with whom they read and studied two passages describing technical equipment. We tested three different scripts for cooperative interactions. In one group (n = 26), partners each read only one passage, then taught each other the information they had read. In the second group (n = 20), both partners read both passages, stopping periodically to summarize the material to each other. In the third group (n = 25), each partner read alternate pages of both passages, stopping to teach each other the material they had read. Free- and cued-recall tests revealed that participants using the cooperative teaching script significantly outperformed participants in the other groups. Further analyses indicated that after playing a teaching role, students recalled significantly more material for the passage they taught. After playing a learning role (i.e., for the passage they did not read but were taught by their partners), they did not recall significantly less than those who read both passages. Although we discuss several possible explanations for these effects, further experimentation is needed to determine their validity.