Seven disagreements about cooperative learning

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.