Joyce van der Laan Smith
Virginia Commonwealth University
Roxanne M Spindle
Virginia Commonwealth University
Abstract: Within accounting education, research indicates that cooperative learning (CL) has the potential to increase student satisfaction without impairing the learning of technical material (Ravenscroft, 1997; Lancaster and Strand, 2001). We investigate whether heterogeneous groups (treatment) produce a more effective CL environment than student self-selected groups (control) by measuring academic performance and student perceptions.
Our findings indicate that middle ability students tended to perform better in more homogeneous self-selected groups while lower ability students did better in academically heterogeneous groupings. High ability students did well in both settings.
All students gave high ratings to the impact of CL on learning and development of team skills, although the control groups responses were consistently higher. All students indicated they would not replace the group activity with more lecture, homework coverage or individual quizzes. However, they were only mildly interested in increasing the time spent in groups, indicating that they value both traditional teaching methods and CL.
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