Cooperation vs collaboration analogy
The misunderstanding: It is important to distinguish cooperation and collaboration in student group work for a few reasons. Most importantly, it clarifies the nature of the group work assignment, the learning outcomes for the assignment, the goals of the assignment, and the activities needed to complete the assignment. When students don’t understand faculty or assignment expectations, students can become confused and frustrated. Misunderstanding and miscommunication can lead to conflict and a breakdown of trust in a group. Factors that might contribute to student mis-understanding is that they confuse cooperation with collaboration, thinking they are the same thing. Some of the confusion stems, I think, from the nature of assessments and grades, which are individual, when group assignments are meant to reflect and develop collective learning and growth. Students want to work together, especially if they are contributing to building a single product, but they are also being graded individually, so want to achieve their own personal goals as well.
If this confusion persists, then it can be difficult to grade students effectively, distinguishing what is being evaluated individually (i.e., achieving individual learning outcomes through what each student contributes to tasks and roles) and what is evaluated collectively (i.e., the quality of the group project overall, and the processes by which the team work together to create the project).
From an individual learning perspective, if the assignment is cooperation-focused, then activities need to be put into place to support cooperation (so that learners can work together to achieve their own goals). However, if the assignment is collaboration-focused, then different activities need to be used to scaffold and build cooperative thinking and habits. A mismatch of the assignment and the activities can lead to students not being sufficiently prepared to be successful for the task at hand.
The clarification analogy: Cooperation is when each individual finds and brings a log to build the same fire. Collaboration is two or more people bringing a single log to build a fire. Or, cooperation is when a group of people each agree to farm their own plots of a shared community garden, while collaboration is that group of people farm a single plot of the garden. Each analogy highlights that while there is a collaborative group goal (the fire, the garden), students are also responsible for their own contributions (the logs, the tending of a plot). Faculty need to identify the extent to which their group assignments are a single plot or multiple-plot garden in order to support students to be successful.
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