According to Kenneth Bruffe (2007) who performed a theoretical analysis on the state of higher education in America, collaborative learning has a positive effect on the academic performance of the students because it motivate learners to do tasks; it can also gather different information to come up with a better …show more content…
Teachers and students collaborate with each other to learn new information and ideas. Collaborative learning is largely based on creation, analysis, and systematic application of structures, it allows teachers and students to learn and adopt various social interaction sequence (Kagan, 1994)
The role of the teacher in collaborative learning is crucial because the teacher acts as the mediator. The role of the teacher increasingly emphasizes mediated learning. Successful mediation will help students to connect new information to their past experiences and to learn in other areas, it will help students figure out what to do when they are in that situation , and it will help them how to learn from those experiences. Above all, teacher is a mediator and she or he will adjust the level of information and support to maximize the ability for learning.
Mediating is defined as facilitating, modeling, and coaching. The teacher must lead instruction in collaborative classrooms and the teacher must has an specific purpose in the collaborative contexts (NCREL,