review the lessons and prepare students for tests before every monthly exam. In Taiwan, students’ future schools are mainly decided by their academic performance, so it is inevitable for high-achievers to stay skeptical about the effectiveness of CL.
In addition, high-achievers still cared about their honors and rewards, so they would chair the in-group discussion. But some of them were so reluctant that they only offered answers without providing the group with adequate explanations in the discussion. Only giving and receiving answers without explanations were detrimental to the achievement gain (Webb, 1985). These high-achievers did not think it their duty to ensure that all the members understood the rationales behind all the questions. They had a strong aversion to the routine that they always shouldered the responsibility to teach other teammates. Consequently, the group members were only given answers without full understanding of the discussion, which might negatively impacted the promotion in listening comprehension ability.
High-achievers, doubtlessly, play the vital roles in the group discussion because of their high language proficiency. They are also expected to be more vigorous to share their knowledge so as to improve other group members’ listening comprehension ability. If the high-achievers are not devoted to the group, the effectiveness of CL will attenuate. The mid-achievers and low-achievers cannot benefit from their group discussions. Hence, listening comprehension ability is impossible to promote unless the mid-achievers and low-achievers are completely taken care of in the group.
Barrier 3: Students Lack Social Skills to Survive the Stress in Small-group Learning.
Herreid emphasized the phenomenon that the competitive nature of our society exists in the classroom, and college students’ early life at school is rooted in a struggle with tough grading schemes. Small-group work is viewed as a lame style of learning
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especially by academically excellent students. They usually cherish the feeling that they have been taken advantage of by their classmates. Additionally, it is still a long way to go for teachers who adopt CL to avoid some harmful and threatening factors:
dominant persons, shy non-participants and personal conflicts over control, etc.
To acquire social skills is the most challenging mission for both the teacher and students. Matthews (1992) conveyed that students strongly dislike working with other students who are in poorer capability than they. These students also have problems working with those classmates at higher levels. Homogeneous grouping is preferred by the gifted and talented students within cooperative activities (Gartin &
Digby, 1993). These students do not tend to spare their time for the minority. On the contrary, they can save much time and effort in the group of the same level. CL cannot always manage to fulfill the ideal goals – establishing a democratic society, showing respect for differences, mastering social and teaching skills, and promising success.
Placing students in heterogeneous groups is not always effective in changing students’
biases and low social status (Cohen, 1990).
Learning in class in Taiwan has been pre-supposed as a model that the teacher says and students listen even if many western teaching modes have been introduced to Taiwan recently. CL is still not trustworthy for most teachers who stick to traditional modes. Learning is thought of as individual business rather than group work. After students graduate from junior high schools, they will be admitted to different senior high schools. All students still need to compete for their ideal senior high schools to study in. It is rare for students at the same class in junior high school to reunite at the same class in senior high school. That could explain why learning seems to be a personal matter in Taiwan. In addition to the competitive atmosphere that curbed CL in the classroom, the obstructive factors such as dominant persons, shy non-participants and personal conflicts did occur in the researcher’s class. Some
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high-achievers and mid-achievers were too demanding to persuade other members to trust their ideas and leadership. These members even complained to the researcher about their problematic groups and urged to change the grouping. Furthermore, some high-achievers were too shy to teach their members more. They just gave simple answers and explanations for the listening tasks. The researcher had detected this and asked them to express more, but the researcher could not change their inborn nature.
Finally, the controversy for answers sometimes happened among group members.
They could not arrive at the eventual consensus in their groups. Some members even announced that they did not want to cooperate with each other anymore. The morale in the groups was obviously low on the grounds of the three factors. The effectiveness of CL was attenuate when the members did not fully trust each other and did not keep the peace in their groups.
CL is sheer different from the traditional academic learning; many students cannot recognize that CL is related to the promotion of listening comprehension ability. No wonder some students mistake CL for playing house and forget to do their shares and to make their members better. To have social skills is a feature of the Central Elements of Cooperative Learning (Johnson, Johnson, & Smith, 1991). Lack of social skills may lead to the inefficiency of the promotion of listening comprehension ability.
Table 5.1 reveals the summary of Herreid’s three barriers to CL. Moreover, Table 5.2 shows the summary of the researcher’s perspectives based on the classroom observation in response to Herreid’s three barriers to CL.
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Table 5.1 The Summary of Herreid’s Three Barriers to CL
Barriers Summary
Students are possibly threatened by the new approach for learning.
Students misunderstand the idea of working in group;
they think that they do all the work and the teacher does nothing. Students suppose that they are exploited.
Students can be hostile to cooperative learning
modes.
Students with excellent grades in science studies prefer traditional teaching way more, but non-science students enjoy the discussion in group more.
Students lack social skills to survive the stress in
small-group learning.
The competitive nature of our society still prevails in the classroom. Dominant persons, shy non-participants and personal conflicts are problems to CL.
Table 5.2 The Summary of the Researcher’s Perspectives in Response to Herreid’s Three Barriers to CL
Barriers Summary
Students are possibly threatened by the new approach for learning.
Several students rejected the new mode of CL due to the past negative experience. Gradually, students changed their attitudes and their opposition weakened.
Students can be hostile to cooperative learning
modes.
Some high-achievers would like to get more academic knowledge from the teacher rather than hold a seemingly time-consuming discussion.
Students lack social skills to survive the stress in
small-group learning.
Besides some high-achievers who had no preference for CL, Dominant persons, shy non-participants and personal conflicts spoiled the function of CL.
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Besides Herreid’s three barriers which undermined the effectiveness of CL, Salomon & Globerson (1989) attributed five debilitating effects to the inadequacy of CL. They are the free rider effect, the sucker effect, the status differential effects, the ganging up on the task, and the other effects. Like Herreid’s three barriers, these effects are also cross-examined with the researcher’s perspectives through the classroom observation. Most of the effects happened in this study and they might cause the inadequacy of promotion in listening comprehension ability.
The First Effect: The Free Rider Effect
The free rider effect occurs when some of the team members spend less mental effort in the discussion. They just go through the teamwork casually, assuming that the job will be done mainly by the more talented and more highly motivated members in the team (Kerr & Bruun. 1983). The idiom “Let George do it” could best explain it.
In the researcher’s class, some students, especially low-achievers who lacked confidence and competence, were unable or unwilling to offer answers in their groups.
They remained silent most of the time and just waited for the high-achievers’ answers and explanations. Unfortunately, they totally missed the main idea of CL. They regarded the grouping as a golden chance to chat with other members or fool around whenever the teacher turned his attention to other groups. It seemed that the mission in group was not their own business.
The free rider effect is the most troublesome part among the five debilitating effects in this study. The free-riders not only saved their effort supposed to contribute to the group but also disturbed the discussion and allured group members to chit chat.
Most of them were mid-achievers and low-achievers that cared less about their grades.
Their absent minds did harm to the morale of the whole group. Their excessive freedom in group might counteract the hard-working members’ motivation to learn in group. Gradually, all the students would lose their group goals. As Slavin (1991) said,
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group goals are one of the elements to ensure achievement. Free-riders may damage the group goals and eventually spoil the promotion in listening comprehension ability in this study, to say nothing of their reluctance to offer the other element, individual accountability, to their groups.
The Second Effect: The Sucker Effect
The sucker effect may make some industrious team members gradually spend less effort answering questions, so that they would not be taken advantage of by other group members (Kerr, 1983). A typical example of the sucker effect is when one of the participants comes up with an idea for an essay and tries to request others for brainstorming; the others would cherish a lukewarm attitude and pretend to be unable to offer help. Consequently, all the team members would lose motivation and operate below the level of what it should have been.
In the researcher’s class, all the students were marked from 1 to 6. 1 stood for those who got the highest monthly English exam score, and 6 the lowest exam score.
The high-achievers knew their roles and duty to instruct other in-group members and subsequently won the rewards and honors. The listening tasks in the listening textbook were not so difficult; no high-achievers could pretend that they were incapable of answering the questions. Furthermore, some mid-achievers also could answer most questions correctly. Fortunately, the sucker effect was not clearly present in the class. As there were only 27 students in this class, everyone knew each other well and the high-achievers could not pretend.
The Third Effect: The Status Differential Effects
Some team members with better ability maintain their high status in the heterogeneous groups. Since they are the ones that mostly give the final solution to the given tasks; their social status keeps rising. Dembo & McAuliffe (1987) found out that the low-achievers interact less with the others and influence the group less.
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Therefore, they stay in lower social status. This effect could be portrayed as the picture: The rich get richer but the poor get poorer.
In the researcher’s class, most of the students had taken classes of CL at primary schools, so they were used to the procedure of CL. The high-achievers knew their roles to assist the mid-achievers and low-achievers. The discussion would still go on no matter what types of achievers they belonged to. However, some students, especially low-achievers, thought that they were unable to give better answers as other high-achievers or some mid-achievers did, so they started to shun away from their group members and kept silent most of the time. Seeing that the other classmates performed well and got more confidence, these low-achievers became self-effacing and lost motivations to study harder. As they kept away from the learning group deliberately in class, the gap of proficiency between them and other classmates increasingly widened. Their grades could not make progress and even got worse.
Their confidence was losing, too. Perhaps they were affected by this effect and dared not to say a word of their thoughts. They preferred to be outsiders in the in-group discussion. Their listening comprehension ability was, of course, hard to promote under this awkward circumstance. This debilitating effect was surely a fatal cause for low-achievers whose grades could not make any progress.
The Fourth Effect: The Ganging up on the Task
Students try to do away with the requirements of the task; they successfully avoid spending much effort they should have paid (Rollett, 1987). For instance, those who are more able writers try to accomplish the writing task with as little effort as possible in a writing class. As one able student comments: My partners and I find ways to pretend that we are busy thinking about the essay.
High-achievers may lose their functions owing to this effect. Although high-achievers have better learning ability, they are still youngsters who like to chit
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chat with their classmates. They would come up with the answers soon but just give their members casual and short explanations. They know that the rest of the time after the discussion is the very time for fun. However, some mid-achievers and low-achievers cannot understand more details for questions in such a hurried time. It is also difficult for the teacher to tell if students are discussing or chit chatting in their groups. Consequently, students’ listening comprehension ability fails to promote.
According to the researcher’s observation in class, some high-achievers or mid-achievers quickly led their members to finish most of listening tasks. Later, they pretended to share thoughts during discussion time, but actually they were chit chatting about their lives. The researcher would not detect their personal discussion until the teacher walked closer to each group to check their discussion. Although this effect did not happen frequently and could be prohibited timely by the teacher in class, it still brought forth an unwelcome disruption to the function of CL. Simplified explanations from the high-achievers might not help the low-achievers. Their grades in achievement tests could not be better under this circumstance. Therefore, their listening comprehension ability was hard to improve.
The Fifth Effect: The Other Effects
When students attempt to provide contributions but they are rejected by others, they will develop self-induced helplessness as a symbol of their self-perceived feelings of incompetence (Langer & Benevento, 1978). This is the first of the other effects and deserves more attention to explore its negative affection.
Another effect is that withdrawal could take place when team members perceive that their legitimate freedom to choose partners, tasks or individual expression is threatened (Brehm & Brehm, 1981). The loss of their privileges may cause their adverse feelings toward CL. In other words, students are more motivated to take part in the group discussion when the negative feelings are removed.
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In the researcher’s class, some mid-achievers and especially low-achievers offered their answers automatically. Nonetheless, these answers were eventually proven to be wrong and resulted in ridicule from their group members. Some of them cared less but some chose to be silent in the next discussion. The motivation of these voluntary members became low in the meantime. They felt small and presumed that they could not change their destiny to be incompetent despite any effort for their studies. They would give up cooperating with other members in their groups and studying further after school. CL, generally recognized as a practical approach to promote learning outcome, even deepened their sense of helplessness. The lack of their motivation to learn more might cause the limited progress of listening comprehension ability. This effect has been widely studied in pedagogy and psychology. For example, this effect is close to the professional psychological term, learned helplessness (Seligman, 1972). Generally speaking, they suffer from this effect and cannot encourage themselves to study anymore. This effect negatively affects the promotion in listening comprehension ability.
This effect could be associated with the status differential effects mentioned above. Once this effect kept occurring in class, the status in class would appear. The mid-achievers’ or low-achievers’ motivation for learning would be worn away gradually because they yielded to their low status and thought that it was no use studying harder.
About the second effect, the teacher had explained the rationale of grouping before the students were separated into different groups. Reformulation of each group would be done after the second monthly exam. Students would be placed with different members to carry on their discussion tasks. However, some students still felt unsatisfied with the new reformulation. The new grouping was decided by their grades, not by their preference for specific classmates. This logic of grouping incurred
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a few complaints among students in the beginning. They would like to choose their good friends to form a group of their own. Compared with other effects discussed above, the effect just slightly impacted the function of CL. Students were still willing to work together for the honors and rewards. Furthermore, an English class just took 45 minutes. Such a short period would not break their friendship. Aside from some initial complaints about grouping, no other adverse words were heard against this reformulation later. This effect was not the main obstacle to the execution of CL in this study.
Table 5.3 demonstrates the summary of the five debilitating effects. Table 5.4 evidences the summary of the researcher’s perspectives based on the classroom observation in response to the five debilitating effects to CL.
Table 5.3 The Summary of the Five Debilitating Effects
Item Summary
The Free Rider Effect Some members suppose the group tasks will be done by capable members so that they can pay less effort.
The Sucker Effect Some high-achievers pretend to be unable to do the group tasks. They do not want to be taken advantage of.
The Status Differential Effects
Some group members interact less with others in the group. They are marginalized and neglected little by little.
The Ganging up on the Task
Some students avoid the effort they should have put in for the tasks and pretend to be busy in the process.
The
Other Effects
1. When some students’ contributions are rejected by the others, they suffer from learned helplessness.
2. Withdrawal could occur when team members cannot choose partners, tasks or individual expression.
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Table 5.4 The Summary of the Researcher’s Perspectives in Response to the Five Debilitating Effects to CL
Item Summary
The Free Rider Effect Some members deliberately waited for the answers but
The Free Rider Effect Some members deliberately waited for the answers but