Linder: I think there are differences among tasks. Something like learning to play the Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto is definitely an individual task. Now you might have a teacher and a mentor, but one person is going to learn it and one person is going to perform it. I think the best tasks for cooperative learning, and in fact the tasks that then are in the natural environment that we most often confront, are tasks that are called conjunctive tasks. That is, where everyone’s effort has to come together in a certain way in order for the group to be successful . . . Everybody has a task to do. Everybody has to do that task effectively in order for the entire group to succeed in its mission. Mountaineering expeditions are the same way, [or] a football team trying to run an effective offense or an effective defense. So, tasks that require everyone to produce, and not necessarily the same thing, I think, are very useful in cooperative learning. Tasks that are much more individualized and tasks that a single person can do that are artificially split up to make them a group task often don’t work well . . . I think it’s very important for instructors who want to use cooperative learning to think very carefully through the structure of the task they’re using and very carefully through the way in which the members of the team are going to work on that task. You have to be a kind of social engineer as well as a civil or mechanical or electrical engineer in order to set up good, effective cooperative learning.