Are Grading Trends Hurting Socially Awkward Kids?

There's a rather spirited discussion going on at the TheAtlantic.com regarding various questions raised by my article there. Some people are claiming that the demands of the 21st require students to work in groups and be graded on their presentation skills. Please weigh in if you have an opinion on this!

Crowds vs. herds

In my book I draw a distinction between "cooperation" and "collaboration," defining the former as people working while interacting, and the latter as people working on joint projects, but not necessarily in one another's presence or with much productive interaction. In collaborations, after the work is divvied up, participants might spend the majority of their time working independently. 

I argue, furthermore, that this is what typifies most successful real-world collaborations. Except for those of us working on construction sites or film sets, we tend to get most of our work done at desks in private offices or cubicles; not at conference tables.

It turns out that there is a good reason for this. In an article in last weekend's Wall Street Journal, Jonah Lehrer reports that:

The good news is that the wisdom of crowds exists. When groups of people are asked a difficult question—say, to estimate the number of marbles in a jar, or the murder rate of New York City—their mistakes tend to cancel each other out. As a result, the average answer is often surprisingly accurate.

But here's the bad news: The wisdom of crowds turns out to be an incredibly fragile phenomenon. It doesn't take much for the smart group to become a dumb herd. Worse, a new study by Swiss scientists suggests that the interconnectedness of modern life might be making it even harder to benefit from our collective intelligence.

The experiment was straightforward. The researchers gathered 144 Swiss college students, sat them in isolated cubicles, and then asked them to answer various questions, such as the number of new immigrants living in Zurich. In many instances, the crowd proved correct. When asked about those immigrants, for instance, the median guess of the students was 10,000. The answer was 10,067.

The scientists then gave their subjects access to the guesses of the other members of the group. As a result, they were able to adjust their subsequent estimates based on the feedback of the crowd. The results were depressing. All of a sudden, the range of guesses dramatically narrowed; people were mindlessly imitating each other. Instead of canceling out their errors, they ended up magnifying their biases, which is why each round led to worse guesses. Although these subjects were far more confident that they were right—it's reassuring to know what other people think—this confidence was misplaced.

The scientists refer to this as the "social influence effect." In their paper, they argue that the effect has grown more pervasive in recent years. We live, after all, in an age of opinion polls and Facebook, cable news and Twitter. We are constantly being confronted with the beliefs of others, as the crowd tells itself what to think.

...

This research reveals the downside of our hyperconnected lives. So many essential institutions depend on the ability of citizens to think for themselves, to resist the latest trend or bubble. That's why it is important, as the Founding Fathers realized, to cultivate a raucous free press, full of divergent viewpoints.

The ideal, then, isn't group think, but independent thinking followed by a compilation of people's thoughts. 

Jonah Lehrer, however, neglects to mention one reason why the social influence effect has grown in recent years:  all the time that today's students are forced to work in groups in K12 classrooms, and, increasingly, in college classrooms as well.  In this case it's not the hyperconnectedness of our wired and wireless lives that's responsible, but the group think of the education world, with its systematic confusion of "cooperation" with "collaboration."

(Cross-posted at Out In Left Field).

Evidence for cooperative learning?

In defense of requiring his students to work in groups, a teacher (posting at education.change.org) recently cited the following, from Johnson, Johnson, and Stanne (2000):

Cooperative learning has been around a long time (Johnson, 1970; Johnson & Johnson, 1989, 1999). It will probably never go away due to its rich history of theory, research, and actual use in the classroom. Markedly different theoretical perspectives (social interdependence, cognitive-developmental, and behavioral learning) provide a clear rationale as to why cooperative efforts are essential for maximizing learning and ensuring healthy cognitive and social development as well as many other important instructional outcomes. Hundreds of research studies demonstrate that cooperative efforts result in higher individual achievement than do competitive or individualistic efforts. Educators use cooperative learning throughout North America, Europe, and many other parts of the world. This combination of theory, research, and practice makes cooperative learning one of the most distinguished of all instructional practices.

Here, cooperative learning is defined as follows:

Cooperative learning exists when students work together to accomplish shared learning goals (Johnson & Johnson, 1999). Each student can then achieve his or her learning goal if and only if the other group members achieve theirs (Deutsch, 1962).

You can read the whole meta-analysis here.

Does anyone have any thoughts on how reliable this meta-analysis is (it seems to be unpublished, only appearing on the University of Minnesota Cooperative Learning Center website, and finds Johnson & Johnson's own method, Learning Together, most effective), or whether there's any research on cooperative learning that contradicts its conclusions?

Logistics of Teaching

I'm hoping the collective wisdom of this blog can help me. I'm teaching in a small private school. There are 15 students in my class, grade levels 4 - 6, with ability levels from 1st grade to beyond 6th grade. I'll be teaching the content areas to the class as a whole, but will be grouping students for math and reading.

My question is, what can I have the other students doing pretty much independently (there will be an aide in the room for most but not all of the group time) while I'm meeting with each reading and math group that is not busy work or a waste of their time? There is close to two hours a day for which I need constructive, yet independent, learning activities. I can think of many things to do, but they all require some teaching, or at least some introduction, from me. I need work that can be done totally independently.

Thanks for your help with this.