CONTEMPORARY EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY 12, 52–61 (1987) 52

Cooperative Learning and Test Taking: Transfer of Skills

JUDITH G. LAMBIOTTE, DONALD F. DANSEREAU, THOMAS R. ROCKLIN, BENNETT

FLETCHER, VELMA I. HYTHECKER, CELIA O. LARSON, AND ANGELA M. O'DONNELL
Texas Christian University

This experiment evaluated the impact of cooperative interactions among students during
studying and test taking. Comparisons were made between four groups: cooperative
learning/cooperative testing; cooperative learning/individual testing; individual learning/cooperative
testing; individual learning/individual testing. All participants were instructed on a learning and test-
taking strategy. Co- operative groups applied the strategy in dyads and individual groups applied the
strategy in isolation. Repeated measures analyses of free recall tests over two 2500-word passages
indicated positive transfer of cooperative test-taking training to individual study and test taking for a
quantitative measure of recall. For re- call accuracy, cooperative study training led to better
performance and trans- fer.
1987 Academic Press, Inc.
Successful academic performance requires two main skills: active processing of new
knowledge during acquisition and competence in demonstrating that knowledge once it has been
acquired. Many educators have found that a practical way to foster these skills is to have students
interact with one another by means of group discussions, team projects, or study groups. Some
students can develop effective cooperative learning strategies by participating in these activities;
however, others experience frustration and confusion. It would be very worthwhile to structure these
cooperative learning episodes so that beneficial results are more likely to occur. The purpose of this
study was to examine the impact of systematic cooperative learning and test-taking strategies on one
component of aca- demic performance, the recall of text material.
The research reported in this paper was supported in part by the Army Research Institute,
Grant MDA-903-82-C-0284. The views, opinions, and findings contained in this report are those of
the authors and should not be construed as an official Department of the Army position, policy, or
decision unless so designated by other official documentation. Requests for reprints should be sent to
Dr. Donald F. Dansereau, Department of Psychology, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, TX
76129.
0361-476X/87 $3.00
Copyright © 1987 by Academic Press, Inc.
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Combining Cognitive Learning Strategies and Cooperative Interaction

Considerable interest in cooperative learning has resulted in a growing body of research

concerning its educational potential. In general, this research has indicated that when students work
together, performance on some academic tasks improves (e.g., Aronson, Stephan, Sikes, Blaney, &
Snapp, 1978; DeVries & Slavin, 1978; Johnson, Maruyama, Johnson, Nelson, & Skon, 1981; Slavin,
1978). One difficulty with many of these studies is that few report any use of current theories and
empirical findings associated with cognitive approaches to learning. For example, there is evidence
that oral summarization (Ross & DiVesta, 1976) and elaboration (i.e., attaching imagery and prior
knowledge to new information to make it more personally relevant and memorable; Reder, 1980) are
important processes in facilitating the learning of new knowledge. Also, research on metacognition
(e.g., Baker, 1979; Markman, 1979; Schallert & Kleiman, 1979; Zechmeister & Shaughnessy, 1980)
indicates that students typically have difficulty monitoring their own cognitive activity. An effective
cooperative learning scheme would take advantage of these findings by structuring the situation so
that oral summarization, elaboration, and metacognition are encouraged and facilitated.
Over the past 5 years, Dansereau and his colleagues have been devel- oping and evaluating
dyadic cooperative learning strategies for acquisition of knowledge from text material (e.g.,
Dansereau et al., 1979; McDonald, Dansereau, Garland, Holley, & Collins, 1979). The basic
procedure entails reading and summarizing material excerpted from science textbooks. As partners,
learners each read a portion (approximately 500 words) of text silently. Then, putting the written
material out of sight, one member of the partnership functions as a "recaller" who summarizes the
facts and ideas in the passage. The other partner serves as a "listener-facilitator" who corrects errors
and notes omissions in the partner's summary (metacognitive activity), and helps elaborate upon and
organize in- formation for efficient storage in memory. At this time the learners reconstruct the
written text to check that their discussion covered the material sufficiently. The partners alternate
roles as they proceed through each portion of text, after which they both work to construct a review
summary over an entire 2500-word text passage. To make the strategy easy to learn and follow, it
was broken down into six steps and given the acronym "First-degree MURDER," as illustrated in
Table 1 (Dansereau, 1985). It was found that students using the cooperative strategy recalled more
information than students working alone or dyads using their own study methods. Furthermore, a
small but significant transfer effect was found: skills acquired during cooperative learning seemed to
carry over

54
 TABLE 1
A COOPERATIVE LEARNING STRATEGY: FIRST-DEGREE MURDER
Mood Establish positive mind-set for reading and studying
Understand While reading, grasp main ideas and facts
Recall Without looking at text, summarize what was read
Detect Check for errors and omissions in recall (metacognitive activity)
Elaborate Facilitate memory by adding mental imagery, prior knowledge, etc.
Review Go over material to be remembered
to individual study situations (McDonald, Larson, Dansereau, & Spurlin, 1985).
Subsequent research has been conducted to clarify which aspects of the strategy contribute to
improved recall and to the transfer effect. It was found that overall recall performance is maximized
when each member of the dyad takes the active summarizer role (Spurlin, Dansereau, Larson, &
Brooks, 1984). It was also determined that it is neither the MURDER strategy per se nor the pair
interaction alone, but a combi- nation of the two which enhances positive transfer to individual study
tasks (Dansereau et al., 1983). Transfer may be facilitated for two reasons: first, it is likely that in a
cooperative situation partners adhere to the suggested strategy more completely because they must
practice aloud and "perform" overtly, so they later follow more of the strategy when they study
alone. Second, partners are given an opportunity to observe each other's processing capabilities,
persistence, and cognitive effort, and thus they act as models for one another.
In summary, the previous research on dyadic cooperative learning indicates that it provides
an effective means for acquisition of text material. In addition, when a learning strategy (i.e., the
steps in "MURDER") are taught and employed in a cooperative situation, students' subsequent in-
dividual performance is improved.
Cooperative Test Taking
A major problem in assessing the benefits of learning strategy training is that performance
can be strongly influenced by the student's test- taking skills. Previous cooperative learning studies
have focused on training during acquisition; test-taking training has not been provided. This study
proposed that the cooperative approach could be profitably extended to test-taking strategy training.
A general test-taking strategy was developed to complement the MURDER strategy. The six-
step procedure shown in Table 2 enables student partners to confer during a free-recall test. One
student takes the role of recaller and summarizes a section of material as he or she best remembers it.
The partner helps fill in missing facts, corrects errors, and elaborates and organizes the material into
a coherent response for the test.
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TABLE 2
A STRATEGY FOR TEST TAKING: SECOND-DEGREE MURDER
Mood Establish positive mind-set for taking a test
Understand Clarify the requirements of the test and comprehend the test questions
Recall Search memory for information to answer the test questions
Detect Check for errors and omissions in recall
Elaborate Organize information into coherent test response
Review Go over test answers for final improvements
Then each student writes down what has been recalled, after which they switch roles for another
chunk of material. Finally they review each other's test answers and provide feedback on the finished
product.
While it may be easy to predict that partners who test cooperatively will outperform
individuals, in the present study we were more interested in whether a cooperative learning and test-
taking experience would lead to improved performance on a subsequent individual task. It was
expected that cooperative test-taking training would result in better free recall not only when partners
worked together but also when they later studied and tested individually.
METHOD
Participants
Seventy-four introductory psychology students received course credit for attending the experimental
sessions.

Materials
Scores from the Group Embedded Figures Test (GEFT; Oltman, Raskin, & Witkin, 1971)
were obtained to subsequently serve as a covariate. The GEFT requires individuals to detect simple
shapes within complex figures. Those who perform this task well are designated as field independent
whereas those who do the task poorly are classified as field dependent. Research on field
dependence-independence has demonstrated that clear differences exist in the information-
processing capabilities of field dependent and field independent individuals (Witkin, Moore,
Goodenough, & Cox, 1977). In previous learning strategy research (Brooks & Dansereau, 1983;
Dansereau et al., 1979; Dansereau et al., 1983; Larson, Dansereau, & Goetz, 1983) it was found that
field independence correlates with text-processing ability.
Learning strategy and test-taking instructions were supplied to each participant in individual
folders. Those who were assigned partners received additional instructions on methods for
interacting and working together. These instructions were a modified version of those used by
Larson et al. (1983). The text material studied by all groups consisted of a 125-word paragraph about
trephining, one 1500-word science fiction passage ("The Orbital Tower"), and two 2500-word
passages extracted from college-level science textbooks, with subject matter from the areas of
geology ("Plate Tectonics") and ecology ("Ecosystems"). An 8-item postexperimental questionnaire
was developed to assess student evaluations of the learning and test-taking strategies. Each response
was made along a 10-point scale, with zero representing the lowest ratings and ten the highest.
 56
Procedure
The experiment was conducted over three sessions lasting approximately 2 h each. In the first
session students were randomly assigned to one of four groups: a C-C group (n 18), who received
instructions to study and take tests cooperatively with a partner; a C-I group (n 18) who studied
cooperatively but received test-taking training individually; an I-C group (n 21), who studied
individually but received test-taking training cooperatively; and an I-I group (n 17) who learned the
same studying and test-taking strategies individually.
Session 1. Students in the cooperative conditions were randomly assigned a same-sex partner.
The partners were instructed to read one 500-word portion of text at a time. Without referring to the
text, one student (the recaller) was responsible for summarizing the material while the other (the
listener-facilitator) made additions, corrections, elaborations, and suggestions for organizing
information to facilitate storage in memory. Partners alternated roles as recaller and listener-
facilitator for every 500-word portion of text. Initial practice was given over a single paragraph and
then over a 1500-word passage, after which a review summary was constructed. Students in
individual conditions received the same learning strategy and practice materials but took the roles of
both recaller and listener. After training and practice, the last 45 min of the first session were spent
studying the plate tectonics passage, using the MURDER strategy. The goal was to prepare for a free
recall essay test over this material.
Session 2. Two days after Session 1, students were provided with a test-taking strategy
(MURDER 2). In all groups the students wrote individual test papers; however, subjects in the
cooperative test-taking groups were given additional instructions on how to interact with a partner
during test-taking training (same-sex partners were randomly assigned in Group I-C while original
partners continued to interact in Group C-C). The procedure was similar to that followed in Session
1, with the partners alternating recaller and facilitator roles. A practice free-recall test was given over
the 1500-word passage ("Orbital Tower") previously studied during Session 1. Following the
training, a free-recall test was given over the "Plate Tectonics" passage. Students were given 18 min
to list all main ideas and details they could recall, using complete sentences. In the individual
conditions each student took the test singly. In the cooperative conditions, partners recalled and
discussed information, then wrote on separate test papers. For the remainder of the session (45 min),
all subjects were given the individual transfer task. They studied the second text passage ("Eco-
systems") individually with the suggestion that they utilize whatever skills they had learned during
the previous training.
Session 3. Two days after Session 2, all participants individually completed an 18-min free-
recall essay test over the transfer passage ("Ecosystems"). The GEFT was then administered, after
which all participants were given a short questionnaire assessing their evaluation of the learning and
test-taking strategies.
RESULTS
Dependent variables were scores derived from the two free-recall tests as follows: a key for each
passage was prepared by parsing the information into an inclusive set of propositions such that each
proposition stated a fact in the form of a sentence or phrase. Experienced raters matched each
statement from the recall tests to a proposition on the key. Each statement was rated from 1
(inaccurate, vague, and/or incomplete) to 4 (accurate and complete). A subset of 15 essays was
scored by a second rater for each passage, yielding interrater reliabilities of r = .98 for the plate
tectonics passage and r .94 for the ecosystems passage. Two
 57
kinds of scores were analyzed: (1) mentions, which represented the number of propositions
mentioned during free recall regardless of accuracy and (2) accuracy, which was computed by
dividing each subject's total rating by the number of mentions.
These scores were then standardized (i.e., converted to Z scores) and analyzed in two
separate repeated-measures ANCOVAS, with type of training (cooperative vs individual study and
test taking) as the between- subjects factors, and passage (initial vs transfer) as the within-subjects
factor. Two covariates were employed: student cumulative grade point averages and scores on the
GEFT.
Adjusted means and standard deviations for the mentions and accuracy scores are presented
in Tables 3 and 4. The analysis of mentions scores indicated that across passages (initial and
transfer), there is a significant main effect of test-taking training F(1,68) = 5.32, p .02. Groups who
received test-taking training cooperatively recalled more than those who received individual test-
taking training. The main effect of cooperative versus individual study training approached
significance, F(1,68) = 3.31, p = .07. There were no significant interactions.
The analysis of accuracy scores revealed that across passages, the main effect of cooperative
vs individual study training was significant, F(1,68) 4.70, p = .03. The study-training by passage
interaction was also significant, F(1,70) = 5.89, p = .01. Post hoc comparisons revealed that groups
who studied Passage 1 cooperatively recalled significantly more accurate information than groups
who studied Passage 1 individually (p < .05). No other differences between group means were
significant.
Responses to the postexperimental questionnaire were combined into

TABLE 3
MEANS AND STandard DeviaTIONS OF STANDARDIZED MENTION SCORES ADJUSTED
FOR GEFT AND GPA
Group Passage
Initial Transfer
Cooperative learning/cooperative testing 0.485 0.035
(n= 18) (0.764)a (0.753)
Cooperative learning/individual testing -0.086 0.150
(n = 18) -0.086 (0.935)
Individual learning/cooperative testing 0.060 0.172
(n = 21) (0.911) (0.958)
Individual learning/individual testing -0.497 -0.407
(n = 17) (0.910) (0.869)

a Standard deviations are in parentheses.

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TABLE 4
MEANS AND STANDARD DEVIATIONS OF STANDARDIZED ACCURACY SCORES
ADJUSTED FOR GEFT AND GPA

two scores. One represented evaluations of the study strategy and the other represented evaluations
of the test-taking strategy. Four items were summed and divided by 4 to give an average evaluation
score for each strategy. The mean evaluations for each group are shown in Tables 5 and 6. The
evaluation scores were subjected to separate ANOVAs with cooperative vs individual training for
studying and test taking as the two independent variables. The analysis of study strategy evaluations
revealed a significant main effect of test-taking training, F(1,73) = 11.09, p = .001, and a significant
study × test interaction, F(1,73) 3.98, p = .05. Post hoc comparisons of group means revealed that the
evaluation scores of the C-I group were significantly lower than the evaluation scores of both the C-
C group and the I-C group. The analysis of test-taking strategy evaluations revealed a significant
main effect of test-taking training, F(1,73) = 4.58, p < .04. Those receiving cooperative test-taking
training evaluated the strategy more positively.

TABLE 5
MEANS AND STANDARD DEVIATIONS OF STUDY STRATEGY EVALUATIONS

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 TABLE 6
MEANS AND STANDARD DEVIATIONS OF TEST-TAKING STRATEGY EVALUATIONS

DISCUSSION
As has been found in past studies, it appears that cooperative study training affects recall
performance favorably. For accuracy (as shown in Table 4), cooperative groups outperformed the
individuals significantly. For number of facts recalled (see Table 3), although the difference be-
tween group means only approached significance, cooperative groups re- called more.
Cooperative test-taking training also affected recall performance favor- ably; however, this
was true only for the amount of information mentioned, not its accuracy. These results agree with
findings in studies of task-oriented small groups (reviewed in Hare, 1976), which indicate that given
a limited time period, groups may produce more answers to a problem than individuals; however,
more errors are also produced.
It is interesting that cooperative studying was associated with higher accuracy of recall while
cooperative test taking was more associated with quantity of recall. When a learner studies alone he
or she must depend on his own monitoring of his understanding. In the cooperative situation, the
listener facilitates that monitoring, leading to more accurate recall. When a learner takes a test alone,
he or she may feel less sure about some information, and will be less likely to include it than if a
second person were present to corroborate. Therefore, before utilizing a cooperative approach in
educational or other settings, it would be worthwhile to specify which kind of results is desired,
accuracy or quantity, or a balance be- tween the two. If both kinds of results are desired, probably
both kinds of cooperation should be practiced. However, the results of this study indicated that
learners who receive both cooperative study and test-taking training were not able to fully transfer
the benefits of the strategy training to an individual task.
It had been expected that a cooperative study and test-taking experience would facilitate
transfer, or improved performance on the second passage which all groups studied and recalled
individually.

60
However, on the transfer passage, the C-C group mean (for mentions, see Table 3) actually
fell below the means of the two groups who received partial cooperative training (C-I and I-C). One
could speculate that the cooperative/ cooperative group had been overwhelmed with strategy
instructions while simultaneously trying to cooperate with a partner. When faced with the transfer
passage, they were less able to remember or utilize all the suggestions given them during training
due to overload. Another interpretation might be that the partners learned to depend on each other
too much during the initial task, and that the loss of support during the transfer task resulted in
lowered performance.
The students who received cooperative strategy training, particularly for test taking, gave
both the study and test-taking strategies the highest evaluations (shown in Tables 5 and 6). While
many of the participants had probably engaged in some form of cooperative studying for regular
classes, cooperative test taking was probably a novel experience for most of the participants, who
may have found it a welcome change from the usual testing situation. That also may be the reason
why the C-I group gave the lowest ratings: they were comparing their experience of having to
interact with a stranger with the more familiar situation of small-group study sessions with friends
and classmates. Given the favorable ratings from participants who received cooperative test taking,
further research is warranted. Cooperative testing may prove useful as a way of training students for
typical real-world situations where co-workers must apply their knowledge and skills to solve
problems.
While the findings reported in this study are indicative of the benefits of cooperative
learning and test-taking strategies, further research is still needed to discover ways to enhance
transfer from cooperative to individual learning situations.

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