Abstract
This study examined the relationship of verbal ability and heterogeneous versus homogeneous pairing of students on cooperative learning tasks (i.e., two students interacting over textbook passages) to the students' performance after engaging in cooperative learning and to their performance on a subsequent individual learning task (transfer). As expected, individuals' scores on a vocabulary test, serving as an indication of verbal ability, were strongly related to performance after engaging in cooperative learning and on the individual learning task. More importantly, it was found that cooperative partners with dissimilar vocabulary scores recalled significantly more main ideas from the passage used in the individual learning task than did partners with similar vocabulary scores.