Seven disagreements about cooperative learning

ABSTRACT

Accounting education faces significant challenges in many countries as it seeks to meet the demand of the profession in the twenty-first century. One of those requirements is that young professionals have teamwork skills. Therefore, many universities include group work activities in their curriculum. In the daily experience, however, students and instructors sometimes hold negative feelings about cooperative learning. Therefore, this article addresses seven disagreements on cooperative learning, frequently mentioned by students and instructors. In particular, (1) group work is only invented to reduce grading time; (2) putting students into a group turns them automatically into a team; (3) teamwork certainly has a positive effect on student satisfaction; (4) free riding, social loafing, or a reduction in effort are simply inevitable; (5) peer assessment solves all problems; (6) guiding teamwork is a piece of cake; and (7) teamwork reduces the individual student’s workload. The paper gives a voice to these issues and provides suggestions for improvement in relation to any or all aspects of cooperative learning in accounting education. A theoretical framework of cooperative learning is presented and ideas to overcome many (or all of the) problems on group work are provided.

KEYWORDS:

• Cooperative learning
• disagreement

Acknowledgements

We thank the many authors who submitted a paper for this special issue and the authors of the accepted papers for their continuous efforts in the four review rounds. Also special words of thank to the reviewers who supported this special issue. Their suggestions improved the quality of the papers and resulted in papers, addressing a broad range of topics on group learning. The reviewers for this special issue are Jean Seow, Singapore Management University, USA; Joan Ballantine, Ulster University Business School, UK; Kim Watty, Deakin University, Australia; Maria Claudia Teixeira, ISCAP, Porto Portugal, Portugal; Neal Arthur, University of Sydney, Australia; Renato Azevedo, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Mexico; Sandra Einig, Oxford Brookes University, UK; Satoshi Sugahara, Kwansei Gakuin University, Japan; Soledad Moya Gutierrez, Esade, Spain; Sue Ravenscroft, Iowa State University, USA; Susan Anders, Midwestern State University, USA; Susan Curtis, College of Business at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA; Tracie Nobles, Austin Community College, USA; Yaneli Cruz, Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo De México (ITAM), Mexico.

We also would like to thank Alan Sangster for providing us the opportunity to (guest)edit a special issue on cooperative learning.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.