Collaboration in Education

A friend of mine recently told me about some MIT advertising that stated that collaboration on PSETs was encouraged. He was frustrated that high school wasn't like this, especially considering how in actual career settings, collaboration is needed. I disagree. The main three advantages I see from collaboration is increased idea diversity, work reduction, and soft-skill building (i.e. non-technical skills, contrasts with hard-skills).

I think that high school classes take a different approach to teaching than college. High school classes teach content in a more brain-dead way: we just memorize the technique or fact and immediately apply it. This generally isn't the case in college (although this is based on Quora answers I read about unis with difficult courses). Thus the increased idea diversity from collaboration isn't in play, and therefore isn't a benefit in high school. Work reduction also isn't really at play because of the idea of social loafing. This psychological principle is that the more people in a group, the more likely that a person does less work than they should, hence they are loafing around due to the social context. Thus the ideal of evenly dividing the work tends to not work out very well. Considering the massive goal and work ethos differences in high school (especially large public ones like my friend and I attend), social loafing is going to definitely be a big factor if collaboration is heavily relied upon in our classes. I need to do more research on this, but it seems intuitive that the cultural similarities in a group greatly affects the level of social loafing². Since colleges, especially selective ones, have students apply and be subject to selection bias, the people in a class are more likely to be culturally similar than at a large, public high school. Thus collaboration works better in a college setting than high school. Finally, high school isn't about getting you ready for your future career. See here [1] in the future for an expansion on this argument.

It isn't just that heavy collaboration in a high school setting has no benefits, it is also a negative. In order for individuals to be able to contribute to a productive, collaborative effort, everyone in the group needs to be able to do the fundamentals. If all we do is collaborate, then an individual's grasp of foundational concepts (like those in high school) will be hindered. As mentioned above, a benefit of collaboration is increased idea diversity, but if no one knows enough of the picture to connect the dots, then no progress can be made. This is due mostly to the limitations of language. If we could read each other's minds, then everyone could get a whole picture perspective by collaborating with others to fill in their missing dots. Unfortunately this isn't the case.

²It appears there has been research on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_loafing#In_group_and_out_group