group work around specific sequential steps, or tightly structured tasks. Others prefer a more spontaneous agenda developing out of student interests or questions. In some collaborative learning settings, the students’ task is to create a clearly delineated product; in others, the task is not to produce a product, but rather to participate in a process, an exercise of responding to each other’s work or engaging in analysis and meaning-making.
Scholars started with a simple question 'is collaborative learning more efficient than learning alone ? While a majority of studies have shown that collaborative learning is often efficient, some studies brought contradictory evidence. Sometimes, collaborative learning does not work properly. The discrepancy between these findings led scholars to seek for conditions under which collaborative learning occurs to be efficient or not. A wide range of conditions or independent variables have been studied. One factor that determines the efficiency of collaborative learning is the composition of the group. This factor is defined by several variables: the age and levels of
