What we learned is that when it comes to the brain and cooperation, the whole is definitely greater than the sum of its parts,” said Fortune, of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. “We found that the brain of each individual participant prefers the combined activity over his or her own part.
It takes two: Brains come wired for cooperation, neuroscientists discover (via wildcat2030)
If vertebrate “brains come wired for cooperation,” as reported in this research, why is it that students so often resist working in groups? The answer is simple: schooling and other mechanisms of our culture have taught us to prefer to behave independently rather than cooperatively. Most teachers reward individual effort and discourage cooperative behavior, and our students come to expect this as normal. So your cooperative activity is going against the conditioning your students have received for the past dozen years or so. It’s going to take a lot more than one activity in one course in one semester for students to unlearn what they have been taught, even if they originally may have been predisposed for cooperation.
(via infoneer-pulse)
Source: sciencedaily.com
