The traditional school was selected for comparison on the basis of being similar to the collaborative school in family socioeconomic status, from a neighborhood like that of many of the children in the collaborative school, and having a traditional classroom structure with learning based mainly on whole class and individual instruction. The selection was based on the advice of school district personnel familiar with the schools, as well as informal classroom observations and interviews with teachers and principals that indicated that this school could be characterized as an excellent school following the usual US instructional format of teacher-run whole-class and individual instruction, with little shared academic discourse between students. This school, like the collaborative school, had been honored with awards in recent years by the state governor.
Our interviews with children, discussions with teachers and the principal, and informal classroom observations indicated that cooperative learning in schoolwork was seldom employed in the traditional school at this time. Our study was carried out in 1991, a year before the Salt Lake City School District launched "cooperative learning" programs in elementary schools throughout the district. Most of the day in the traditional school involved either teacher/whole class or teacher/ individual student interactions or individual work. Joint projects and freedom to collaborate were rare in the traditional school, as was assistance in learning to work together. Some of the children mentioned in post-interviews that in their classrooms, helping was treated as ‘cheating.’ This arrangement is consistent with observations of US elementary schools in which students’ initiation of communication is controlled by the teacher, with teachers relying on known-answer questions in which they set students questions or tasks, students respond, and teachers evaluate the students and their responses (Cuban, 1984; Mehan, 1979).
Like the families at the collaborative school, families at the traditional school had the option of sending their children to other schools in the district, because the district provided flexibility in attending out-of-neighborhood schools. Most children at the traditional school were from the surrounding neighborhood; middle-class families in Salt Lake City often choose housing on the basis of being close to particular schools. Parent involvement in the traditional school was mainly in PTA meetings, fundraising, and helping with children's homework.
Many characteristics of the children were similar across the two schools, including standardized achievement test scores of the children. Ethnicity of the families at both schools was similar -- predominantly European-American, consistent with the Salt Lake City population at the time. The traditional school draws from a middle- to upper-middle-class population whereas the collaborative school attracts a more heterogeneous but basically middle-class population. The proportions of students from low-income families (qualifying for free or reduced-price lunches) were 12% from the collaborative school and 6% from the traditional school in 1994, according to figures provided by the Salt Lake City School District.