Ten myths of cooperative learning in engineering education

The practice of using active learning as a teaching paradigm has been a mainstay of the K-12 community for a long time. Even with mounting evidence attesting to the efficacy of these techniques, college faculty have generally been slow to adopt interactive teaching methods. The authors have been involved in Project LEA/RN (Learning Enhancement Action/Resource Network) at Iowa State University, a program created to provide training, resources, and encouragement to faculty members who want to improve student learning. During our own induction into the program, and now as work group facilitators, we were surprised to hear faculty from different disciplines cite identical reasons why active learning wouldn't work in their classroom. Examples include: interactive exercises won't work in large classes; students will refuse to participate; there's no individual accountability when students work in teams; you can't cover as much material if you use an interactive approach, etc. In this paper, we discuss ten myths of cooperative learning and how our Project LEA/RN groups were able to work through them one by one.