Sallm-Group Discussion in Philosophy 101

Jock Glidden and Joanne Gainen Kurfiss

S mall-group activities (or "collab-
orative learning"; Bruffee 1984)
offer promise as a teaching meth-
od to counteract students' passivity
and promote high-level learning. But
using small groups means sacrificing
lecture time and loss of control over
subject matter. Many professors fear
that reducing lecture time and control
results in students learning less. They
are, therefore, understandably reluc-
tant to trade the familiar benefits of
lecture for the chancier benefits of
small-group work without some reas-
surance that the gains will outweigh the
risks. How does small-group or "col-
laborative" learning measure up to the
lecture method as a way to help stu-
dents learn abstract material? And how
might an interested faculty member an-
swer this question in the context of his
or her own course?

We came to these questions from dif-
ferent but complementary perspec-
tives. The first author is a philosophy
professor teaching relatively large sec-
tions of his department's introductory
course. He wanted to find a way to in-
crease student participation and to help
students learn to reason about philo-
sophical questions. He read an enthusi-

Jock Glidden is an associate professor of
philosophy at Weber State College in Og-
den, Utah, and Joanne Gainen Kurfiss is
the director of the Teaching and Learning
Center at Santa Clara University in Santa
Clara, California.

astic account of the use of small groups
in an introductory philosophy course
( Sprague 1984) and thought it was
worth a try. In the spring of 1985, he
attended an American Philosophical
Association workshop on teaching,
where he presented a videotape illus-
trating the use of group exercises in his
introductory philosophy course. Ques-
tions raised by workshop participants
led him to seek the second author's
help in finding a way to assess the ben-
efits of small group methods.

The second author is a psychologist
interested in college students' learning
and intellectual development. She had
often used groups to stimulate partici-
pation in her own classes and was fa-
miliar with research and practice sug-
gesting the value of collaborative learn-
ing methods (e.g., Sharan 1980; Slavin
1980; Webb 1982). For example, in a
method called "cooperative controver-
sy," students team up to study contro-
versial subjects, then synthesize their
findings. More than competitive team
debate or individual study, cooperative
controversy increases students' use of
evidence on both sides of an issue -- a
valuable outcome for a philosophy
course. But this promising method has
been tested primarily with middle-
school children (e.g., Johnson and
Johnson 1985).

At the college level, Kraft ( 1985 ) de-
scribes successful use of small groups
to increase participation in a literature
class, and Michaelsen ( 1983 ) reports on
a small-group method used in large
"lecture" sections of an organizational
behavior course. However, neither of
these authors provides empirical data
to show that learning outcomes of
group methods are equal to or better
than outcomes observed in traditional
lecture or seminar-type courses.

A few studies that explore collabora-
tive learning at the college level suggest
the promise of small-group methods.
In a laboratory study, students who
wrote summaries of text passages as-
sisted by an active, questioning peer
learned more from the passages than
those who either had a passive partner
or worked alone ( Spurlin, Dansereau,
Brooks, and Larson 1984). Troyka
( 1973 ) and Clifford ( 1981 ) provide
classroom-based evidence suggesting
that small-group work enhances the
writing ability of college students;
however, their treatments included
other features (simulation-based learn-
ing in Troyka's case; sequenced-writ-
ing instruction in Clifford's) that may
have contributed substantially to the
positive outcomes observed.

These studies and both authors' pos-
itive experiences with collaborative
learning encouraged us to seek ways to
evaluate the effectiveness of small-
group methods in an actual classroom.
We began by reviewing students' work
in the class that had been videotaped.
Analyzing test results, Glidden found
that students in the course scored
somewhat higher on essay questions

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