Impact of Group Processing on Achievement in Cooperative Groups

Group processing was examined as a variable mediating the relationship between cooperative learning and achievement. Group processing may be defined as a review of a group session to describe the member actions that were helpful and unhelpful and to decide what actions to continue or change. Four conditions were included in the study: cooperative learning with no processing, cooperative learning with teacher-led processing (the teacher specified what cooperative skills to use, observed, and gave whole-class feedback about how well students were using the skills), cooperative learning with teacher- and student-led processing (the teacher specified what cooperative skills to use, observed, gave whole-class feedback about how well students were using the skills, and had groups discuss how well they interacted as a group), and individual learning. Forty-eight high-ability Black American high-school seniors and entering college freshmen at Xavier University were given a complex computer-assisted problem-solving assignment. Students in the three cooperative conditions performed better than those in the individual condition. The combination of teacher- and student-led processing resulted in greater problem-solving success and achievement in the cooperative conditions.