I__. - International Military Testing Association

Improvements in performance were the same across training
conditions, but the 4-student groups needed only two-thirds the
time required by individuals to achieve comparable performance.
Individuals and a-student groups were statistically the same here.
Both the 4 and l-student groups made substantially fewer demands
on instructor time as measured by ltcalls for proctor assistance",
e.g 0 and 27 respectively compared to 115 calls from individuals.
At the Ft. Lee TTFA, Hagman and Hayes (1986) examined the
effectiveness of cooperative methods in a more traditional, noncomputer
based setting. They wanted to define specific conditions
under which CL would and would not work. From a review of the
literature, they hypothesized that effectiveness of CL increases' -
with increasing group size, though only when incentives were
provided which encourage group members to share knowledge.
Subjects were drawn from one unit (annex) of instruction in
the 76C MOS Advanced Individual Training (AIT) course for supply
clerks. Within this unit, the students receive a series of lectures
each followed by a practical exercise (PE). Midway and at the end
of the unit, the students are individually tested. Students who
fail, go to study hall for remediation. Those who fail a retest are
llrecycledVt, i.e required to repeat the annex.
For the experiment, students were assigned to one of 3 groupsize
conditions. They did the PEs alone, in groups of 2, or in
groups of 4. The groups of 2 and 4 were further divided into two
incentive conditions. Under one condition (Group Incentive), if any
student in the group failed, every group member went to study hall.
Under a second condition (Individual Incentive) only the failing
student went to study hall. Hagman and Hayes predicted that under
a group incentive (i.e. everyone to study hall), performance would
increase as group size increased, but decrease with increasing
group size under individual incentive.
Results partially supported this prediction. For each of the
two tests in the annex, groups of four were clearly optimal under
the group incentive. But statistically groups of two did not out
perform individuals. Recall that Shlechter had found a similar
result at Ft. Knox. These similar results suggest, as a preliminary
conclusion, that CL groups should contain more than two people.
Other results supported the value of CL, but were inconsistent with
the main hypothesis of the experiment. During the PEs, cooperative
groups made fewer errors than did individuals, with or without the
group incentive. In fact incentive made no difference at all.
A potentially negative effect of CL was that groups took
longer to complete PEs than did individuals. Not surprising since
CL requires time for students to exchange information and ideas.
However, if the added time does not exceed reasonable amounts of
available instructional time or is off set by benefits, it can be
discounted. Both conditions were satisfied in this study.
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