Penetration for Cooperative Learning in Engineering Education: A Systematic Literature Review

This full “research” paper presents the results of a systematic literature review that investigates the penetration of cooperative learning pedagogy in engineering education. The study considered 176 articles published between 2010 and 2020 from the google scholar database, of which 79 met the inclusion criteria. Despite the deep-rooted cooperative learning theory, results revealed that most records equated Cooperative Learning to teamwork, grouping strategies and collaborative learning. The remaining records span several engineering disciplines and focus on developing competencies at the lower levels of Bloom’s taxonomy, i.e., acquiring factual and conceptual knowledge among students. The records can be categorized into four broad themes: application of cooperative learning for knowledge acquisition, application of cooperative learning for knowledge application, i.e., problem-solving contexts, comparison of effectiveness between Cooperative Learning and other pedagogies, and development of a new framework by integrating cooperative learning principles and structures. This study ends with a set of questions to further the use of cooperative learning for engineering problem-solving.