Why Teamwork? The Usefulness of Team Assignments in College and University Courses

Why is collaborative learning better than lectures for memory storage and recall? What are the drawbacks of collaborative learning and how can we address them?

Classroom lectures can be useful and engaging, but they have a problem—students usually forget what they heard. Teamwork helps with memory and recall. The first part of this video explains several ways in which team assignments, unlike lectures, can help students improve their storage of information and ease retrieval of information. It also explains secondary benefits of social learning practices like collaborative learning, cooperative learning, and team-based learning.

The second part of this video explains some two problems that arise during collaborative learning: high social loafing and low psychological safety. Social loafing involves putting in less effort with the expectations that others will pick up the slack. Low psychological safety entails a shared feeling that taking risks is too costly for one's reputation. Here, the video explains how activities that build listening skills and cohesion can mitigate these two problems.

If you're showing this in a classroom, you can pause the video between the first and second parts, depending on your lesson plan. This video is not intended to be a comprehensive explanation of team-based learning and may not serve advanced classes on education, cognitive science, or psychology.

Chris C. Martin created the video with help from Wendy Newstetter and Joseph M. LeDoux at the Coulter Institute for Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under IUSE/PFE: RED Grant Number 1730262. BME GeorgiaTech Emory.