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Productive Helping in Cooperative Groups

The past 20 years have seen a tremendous increase in the use of peer-directed collaborative group work both in classroom instruction and in assessments to give students an opportunity to learn from each other. Using examples drawn from a program of peer learning in middle school mathematics, this paper identifies a set of helping behaviors that best predict learning in collaborative small groups. Specifically, this paper describes conditions that must be satisfied for helping behavior to be effective and the responsibilities of students seeking help, students giving help, and teachers to make helping productive for learning. The past 20 years have seen a tremendous increase in the use of peer-directed small-group work. Not only is group work used widely in classrooms to improve student learning; large-scale assessment programs and small-scale, in-class assessments increasingly use collaborative small-group work in which students work together to solve problems or complete projects (e.g., the California Assessment Program: Awbrey, 1992; Bartlett, 1992; Pandey, 1991; the California Learning Assessment System: Saner, McCaffrey, Stecher, Klein, & Bell, 1994; Connecticut’s Common Core of Learning Assessment: Baron, 1994; Connecticut State Board of Education, 1987; Lomask, Baron, Greigh, & Harrison, 1992; and the Oregon State Department of Education: Neuberger, 1993; Shavelson & Baxter, 1992). In addition, emerging state and national standards for assessment often include recommendations for the incorporation of small-group work (e.g., Kansas State Board of Education, 1993; Mathematical Sciences Education Board, National Research Council, 1993). Although assessment programs build in opportunities for collaborative work most often in science, peer collaboration is also used for reading, writing, and interdisciplinary tasks. Collaborative science assessments usually have small groups