Student Team Learning and Success for All

This chapter tells a personal history of forms of cooperative learning developed and researched at Johns Hopkins University: initially Teams-Games-Tournaments (TGT) and Student Teams Achievement Divisions (STAD), and later Success for All (SFA). These programs strongly emphasize achievement as the goal of cooperative learning and have been primarily applied in grades K to 12 reading, mathematics, and writing. A series of experimental studies with both STAD and TGT showed the effectiveness of these approaches in comparison to traditional control groups. In two major reviews of cooperative learning research, Slavin concluded that cooperative learning methods that use group goals/rewards and individual accountability consistently increase student achievement more than control methods in elementary and secondary classrooms, and that cooperative learning methods that use group study but not group rewards for individual learning do not increase student achievement more than control methods. The programs of STAD, TGT, and SFA developed from a focus on individual teachers to the school as the unit of change. They emphasize group goals and individual accountability. Today, our main emphasis is on Success for All, which operates in about 1,000 schools in the United States and the United Kingdom. The chapter includes a description of the Success for All program and research supporting its effectiveness. Cooperative learning is one of the major components of the SFA program.