Jigsaw Groups and the Desegregated Classroom: In Pursuit of Common Goals

Abstract

The desegregated classroom has not produced many of the positive results initially expected by social scientists some 25 years ago. It is argued that one of the major reasons for this failure is the over-emphasis on competitiveness at the expense of interdependence in the classroom. In short, students in most classrooms very rarely cooperate with each other in pursuit of common goals. In this article, we describe a program of research in wihich elementary school students are "forced" to spend part of their classroom time mastering material in an interdependent structure. The results indicate that such structured interdependence increases the self-esteem, the morale, the interpersonal attraction, and the empathy of students across ethnic and racial divisions, and also improves the academic performance of minority students without hampering the performance of the ethnic majority.