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studies unit ...." A second session focused on practicing interpersonal skills (e.g. active listening, stating ideas clearly, providing constructive criticism, accepting responsibility for one's behavior) and collaborative skills (e.g. sharing tasks fairly, taking turns, resolving problems democratically, and clarifying differences of opinion)" (Ashman & Gilles, 1997, 264). Students in the trained groups engaged in more cooperative and less non-cooperative behavior than peers in the untrained groups. The former were also more task oriented, less likely to work independently, were more responsive to peers who requested explanations, and gave more task-related help to each other. Children in the trained groups also achieved higher scores on a test of learning outcomes than their peers in the untrained groups. Those in the trained groups reported they felt they could share ideas with one another more openly than peers in the untrained groups. The Australian study does not necessarily indicate how children anywhere else might respond to advance training in group skills. But this finding is consistent with earlier work (Battistich, Solomon & Delucchi, 1993; Cohen, 1994a). We may safely conclude that all school children are likely to derive greater benefit from their learning in cooperative small groups if, before they are asked to work together, they learn how to function in that setting and learn what are teachers' expectations. Equally important is the conclusion that students who did not benefit from some preparatory instruction about how to function in cooperative groups could find the experience unrewarding or worse, and investigators will report negative findings about the effects of cooperative learning. I doubt if investigators would study the effects of cooperative learning on students whose teachers had never used these methods and did not learn about them before the research study began. Students should not be treated differently than teachers. This publication reports only a small portion of the data collected as part of the excellent doctoral dissertation by Robyn Gillies (1994; see also Gillies, 1997). Some Cooperative Learning Methods and Gifted Students: A Study 851 children, in 36 6th, 7 th and 8 th grade classrooms in Virginia and North Carolina, participated in a study by Ramsay and Richards (1997). The authors describe the C-L method used in their study as follows: "...teachers using cooperative learning had at least some training in one or more of the following models: STAD, TGT, CIRC, TAI or Learning Together....they did not necessarily implement the model fully, or even as intended. Teachers adapted the model to their own styles of teaching, using them more loosely than they would be prescribed by the models' authors..." (163). No information was provided about how these various methods were combined, or what in fact actually took place in the classrooms. Nor is a rationale provided as to why these methods, and not others, were considered appropriate for a study with gifted children. The study found that gifted students liked cooperative learning less than did children in the general population in the schools studied. The authors' eminently reasonable explanation of this finding is that, if gifted students are bored and frustrated by classroom learning that emphasizes rehearsal of well known social and academic skills, they will not feel they are making progress and, consequently, will not like that form of teaching or learning. Most if not all of the original research on these particular methods involved lower class students with poor academic achievement records. The explicit aim of that body of research was to improve these students' acquisition of basic learning skills, a goal that appears to have been achieved with considerable success (Madden, Slavin, Karweit, Dolan, & Wasik, 1993; Slavin, Madden, Dolan & Wasik, 1996). The present study lacks a theoretical rationale connecting