The techniques for encouraging cooperation that we will be using were developed by David and Roger Johnson at the University of Minnesota, and Robert Slavin at the Johns-Hopkins University. A great deal of research, much of it conducted by David and Roger Johnson, indicates very strongly that students learn best when a major part of their learning comes from other students. For many people in academia, professors as well as students, this seems counter-intuitive. It seems that learning would be best when an expert (the teacher) transmits information (the lecture) to a novice (the student). One reason that this seems that it would be most efficient is because we tend to view education as the transmission of knowledge, and we make an analogy between learning and electronic data transmission, as occurs between two computers. However, this simplistic model does not adequately represent learning. For a person to learn, active rehearsal must occur, and one of the best forms of active rehearsal is to talk to someone else about what you know. Furthermore, the communication is most effective when the two parties have a shared cognitive set. What this means is that two people know similar things and think about things in similar ways. It turns out that one of the best ways of actively rehearsing material with people with shared cognitive sets is to be in small groups of peers. Furthermore, the Johnson's have described the conditions under which this peer learning is most effective, as detailed on the page entitled Basic Elements of Cooperative Learning.