Assessing the Effect of Bilateral Collaborations on Learning Outcomes

Despite recent interest in the effects of student-driven collaborations on learning outcomes, little or no empirical investigations examine the potential benefits from collaboration between instructors of separate, but related, courses. This study proposes a learning intervention that explicitly accounts for interdependencies across courses and extends the traditional definition of collaborative learning to include the synthesis of teaching and learning in four courses through bilateral, group activities between instructors and among students. A student-performance measure assesses the intervention. Statistical results suggest that the collaborative learning intervention improved student-writing performance. Copyright 2009 Agricultural and Applied Economics Association