Collaberative vs Cooperative Cont...Lisa's notes

I never have given too much thought to the differences/similarities to collaberative and cooperative learning. I found it interesting to read Panitz's detailed article about the topic. In a nutshell, collaboration "focuses on the process of working together" while cooperation "stresses the product of such work". Cooperative learning uses quantiative methods to measure achievement (the product). This method is more 'teacher-centered'. On the other hand, collaborative learning is more qualitative (analyzing student responses). This approach is more 'student-centered'. It is designed to pick up where cooperative leaves off. The constructivist theory lays the foundation for both methods of learning, so there are many paralells. They both use groups, assign specific tasks, and share their findings. The major difference is that cooperative deals exclusively with traditional (canoniacal) knowledge while collaborative learning deals with nonfoundational knowledge (reasoning and questioning). Cooperative learning is great to start with, but as educators we should be striving for the collaborative learning with our teaching methodology. We want our students to think on their own and question their experiences.