Cooperative Learning is a Brain Turn-On

Although I attended school for 21 years before entering the University of California Santa Barbara Graduate School of Education Teacher Education Program (TEP) in 1998, I had never worked in learning groups aside from the occasional science experiment or medical school cadaver dissection. Yet even those experiences were not designed as cooperative group work; they were arranged simply for the purpose of sharing materials.

Most of my classes in the TEP program incorporated cooperative learning techniques as an integral part of the instruction. In our classrooms, we never sat in rows, but always at round tables with room for four to six students. Rarely did a day go by when we did not work together on a cooperative project such as a poster and presentation, a short videotape, or a skit performance. I responded to this style of teaching and of learning quite positively, both cognitively and socially. Some of my enthusiasm was probably rooted in my being, as I am a global, interpersonal style learner (Checkley, 1997; Kagan & Kagan, 1998). But I found my classmates, with their varied learning styles, also inclined toward collaboration.

As I experienced the benefits of collaboration, I also discovered that an integral part of the process was the departure by our professors from the traditional roles of imparters and assessors of knowledge. Unlike the teachers I had previously studied under,my education professors assumed roles of information resources in more democratic classrooms. I discovered that relinquishing traditional autocratic control and allowing students to collaborate interactively with classmates to achieve common goals resulted in our becoming more invested and engaged in our learning. When I completed my masters of education degree in cooperative learning and became a middle school teacher, I found that I followed the modeling of my teachers and used cooperative learning in my own classroom. I then called upon my clinical and research training and experience in neurology to investigate the learning research being done through neuroimaging and brain mapping. I found evidence of brain and neurochemical activity that supported the positive results I was having with the cooperative approach to middle school teaching.

Psychosocial Benefits

Consider the increased comfort and enjoyment that students have when pleasurable social interaction is incorporated into their learning experience (Reeve, 1996). This is especially true during adolescence when peer group influence plays such an important developmental role in the psychosocial process of separation from parents along the road to individualization. For example, in early elementary school, students often raise up from their seats when they wave their hands enthusiastically in hopes of being called upon to answer a question. By middle school, some students consider it uncool to volunteer answers or even appear intelligent in class. These same students are more willing to participate and even show enthusiasm about challenging tasks when they are engaged in learning activities with supportive cooperative groups.

Erikson (1968) theorized that the developmental crises of adolescence are turning points during periods of increased vulnerability, and these turning points present opportunities for the development of psychosocial strength. He proposed that during these developmental stages the adolescent develops new capacities and psychosocial strengths by working through these developmental crises. Inclusion, a sense of belonging to a group where a student feels valued, builds resiliency. Resilient adolescents have greater success, social competence, empathy, responsiveness, and communication skills. They also demonstrate greater flexibility, self- reflection, and ability to conceptualize abstractly when solving problems.

Successfully planned group work can help to support students during these developmental crisis opportunities by reducing the fear of failure that can cause them to avoid academic challenges. Well- structured cooperative group activities build supportive classroom communities, which, in turn, increase self-esteem and academic performance.

NeuroimagingWatching the Social Brain Learn

Neuroimaging and neurochemical investigation provide evidence of the brains response to stress as well as to pleasure and positive social interaction. Research on the amygdala reveals it to be one location of an affective filter in the brain (Pawlak, Magarinos, Melchor, McEwen, & Strickland, 2003). During periods of high stress or anxiety that some students may experience when asked to do a math problem on the board or make an oral presentation to the class, their emotional state is associated with greatly heightened metabolism (more glucose and oxygen use) flooding this emotional portion of the limbic system on Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) studies.

When the amygdala is in this hyperexcitable, anxiety-provoked state, there is profound reduction in the neural activity indicative of information flow into and out of the amygdala. In the normal, relaxed state, the brain receives information as sensory input (e.g., for hearing or vision) into specific sensory receptive centers. From these areas, neural pathways project this information to the amygdala. In the amygdala emotional meaning may be linked to the information and connections are made with previously stored, related knowledge (Chugani & Phelps, 1991). The new information, now enhanced with emotional or relational data, then travels along specific neuronal circuits to the higher cognitive centers of the brain, such as the prefrontal cortex, where information is processed, associated, and stored for later retrieval and executive functioning (Kato & McEwen, 2003).

In fMRI scans of adolescents in states of affective, emotional anxiety, when the amygdala is metabolically hyperactive, the pathways that normally conduct information in and out of the amygdala show greatly reduced activity. Thus, new information is blocked from entering the memory banks by this metabolic blockade of the hyperactive amygdala (Toga & Thompson, 2003).

When students participate in engaging learning activities in well-designed, supportive cooperative groups, their affective filters are not blocking the flow of information. When you plan your group so that each members strengths have authentic importance to the ultimate success of the groups activity, you have created a situation where individual learning styles, skills, and talents are valued, and students shine in their fortes and learn from each other in the areas where they are not as expert. They call on each others guidance to solve pertinent and compelling problems and develop their interpersonal skills by communicating their ideas to partners. The brain scans of subjects learning in this type of supportive and social learning situation show facilitated passage of information from the intake areas into the memory storage regions of the brain. This is consistent with the original cognitive psychology research and theories of Krashen (1982) about the affective filter that learning associated with positive emotion is retained longer and visa versa.

Reward-Stimulated Cooperative Learning

Studies of brain neurochemistry also support the benefit of associating rewarding, positive social experiences with the learning process. This has been called dopamine-based reward-stimulated learning (Waelti, Dickinson, & Schultz, 2001). Information travels along nerve cells branching and communicating sprouts (axons and dendrites) as electrical impulses. However, where these sprouting arms connect to the next neuron in the circuit, the information has to travel through a gap between the end of one nerve and the beginning of the next one. In these gaps, called synapses, there are no physical structures, unlike the wires that connect appliances to electric outlets, along which the electric impulses can travel. When crossing over synaptic gaps, the information impulse must be temporarily converted from an electric one into a chemical one. Neurotransmitters are brain proteins released by the electrical impulse on one side of the synapse, to then float across the synaptic gap, carrying the information with them to stimulate the next nerve ending in the pathway. Once the neurotransmitter is taken up by the next nerve ending, the electric impulse is reactivated to travel along to the next nerve cell.

Dopamine is the chemical neurotransmitter most closely associated with attention, memory storage, comprehension, and executive function. The theory of reward-stimulated learning and other reinforcement learning theories are based on the assumption that the brain finds some states of stimulation to be more desirable than others. The brain is believed to make associations between specific cues and these desirable states or goals. Dopamine activity can be evaluated through neuroimaging. It has been found that dopamine release is increased in brain centers associated with learning and memory in response to rewards and positive experiences. Research found that the brain released more dopamine into these learning circuits when the individual was playing, laughing, exercising, and receiving acknowledgement(e.g., praise) for achievement (Salamone & Correa, 2002).

These frontal lobe, dopamine-sensitive regions are seen on neuroimaging as activated in pleasure and reward, wakefulness, and satiety. It has been shown that drugs of abuse affect nerves along this dopamine pathway. This is a basis for theories that when the brain does not release its own dopamine reward from pleasurable experiences it is vulnerable to the allure of the psychoactive drugs that activate the dopamine pathway (Everitt, Parkinson, Olmstead, Arroyo, Robledo, & Robbins, 1999). Follow up research found that when subjects anticipatedpleasurable states, there was increased release of dopamine associated with the expectation of pleasure (Holroyd, Larsen, & Cohen, 2004).

Many of the motivating factors that have been found to release this dopamine are intrinsic to successful cooperative group work such as social collaboration, motivation, and expectation of success, or authentic praise from peers. Because dopamine is also the neurotransmitter associated with attention, memory, learning, and executive function, it follows that when the brain releases dopamine during or in expectation of a pleasurable experience or reward, this dopamine will be available to increase the processing of new information. That is what occurs when students enjoy a positive cooperative learning experience, and even when they anticipate participation in that type of activity.