Gifted Education and Cooperative Learning: A Miss or a Match?

Johnson, Johnson, and Smith (1991) synthesized more than 375 studies on the effect of cooperative, competitive, and individualistic efforts on student achievement and productivity and concluded that cooperative learning results in more higher level reasoning, more frequent generation of new ideas and solutions, and greater transfer of what is learned within one situation to another. Perhaps it will likewise serve as encouragement to fellow educators who work with gifted students and are enchanted by cooperative learning, yet hesitant to remove the training wheels.