2. Literature Review

Since cooperation has been one of the most important parts of social life, scholars started to study the cooperative learning since the ancient time. In fact, the study about such a learning method could be traced back to the 1st century BC when Romans made great contributions to the development of the human’s civilization. The famous Roman scholar Quintilianus (Ren Zhongyin 87) used to make the statement that the students could make much benefit from teaching each other. It is an important standpoint to make people realize the significance of cooperation in teaching activities. However, it turned out that such a statement had not been attracted adequate attention to the public since the people who put forward the similar statement as that of Quintilianus were limited. In the 17th century, scholars focusing on making researches about education started to pay attention to the cooperative learning method. For instance, American educationist named as Comenius (Zhang Binxian 237) used to state that learners could gain some useful knowledge from his teachers and other learners so that learners should be encouraged to communicate with each other and the possibility of gaining more meaningful information could be increased. Even though Comenius had already realized the significance of cooperation among learners, he did not make further researches about how to make use of cooperation to improve the efficiency of teaching activities. American educationists put forward plenty of useful teaching methods that could help improve the teaching efficiency. For instance, famous educationist, Bruner (Feng Zhongliang 87) established the cognitive structure education theory and provided theoretical basis for the application of the cooperative learning method for various teaching activities. Besides, the American scholar Skinner (Feng Zhongliang 98) refined the cognitive structure education theory and the Grasping-learning theory. There is no doubt that these theories laid important foundation for the wide application of the cooperative learning method to various teaching activities. However, those theories were not useful enough because teachers have not made noticeable achievements in improving the teaching efficiency and those scholars attached too much attention to the establishment of the theoretical framework and ignored the importance of practice. After realizing this defect, educationists started to pay more attention to the issue of how to make sure of efficient communication between teachers and learners in teaching practice. That is exactly the start of the time when the cooperative learning method could be applied to more teaching activities.

Besides the scholars in the USA, the educationists in the UK made some contributions to the development of the cooperative learning method. For instance, the famous educationist Mevarech (Jin Yule 25) pointed out that the term cooperative learning could be defined as the activities in which the learners cooperate with each other to learn specific knowledge to reach the same goal. There is no doubt that such statements and methods applicable to this kind of learning activities are important for the people in the UK who are so proud of their history that they prefer insisting on the traditional rule and method. 

In addition, Canadians also made some contributions to the development of the cooperative learning method. They put forward their opinion that the essence of cooperative learning was that the students were pided into some groups which are different from each other in specific aspects and assigned to complete a series of tasks as teachers have required. Such a statement was important due to the fact that it could help teachers understand the essence of the teaching method so that they were more likely to make much more achievements in the application of this teaching method.