Abstract

The importance of teamwork as a core capacity in the new university curricula is beyond all doubt. It is therefore crucial to know what cooperative learning is and how efficient it is for teams of students that use it. Thus, the aim of this paper is to operationalise the concept of cooperative learning and to study its consequences on both the individual learning of the members of a team and on the overall performance achieved by the team as a whole. Structural equation models were used on a sample of 319 students in a marketing subject at a Spanish public university. The results obtained show that students learn better in subjects in which cooperative learning is applied, and the teams performance also improves. We therefore fully endorse fostering its use in the classroom. Lastly, several new lines of research are proposed to complete current knowledge about cooperative learning.