Reconsidering Jigsaw social psychology: Longitudinal effects on social interdependence, socio-cognitive conflict regulation, motivation, and achievement.

Jigsaw is a peer learning procedure based on the assumption that making “children treat each other as<br>resources” (Aronson & Patnoe, 2011, p. 8) stimulates cooperation among equals. Using a short-term,<br>longitudinal experimental design in 14 sections of an undergraduate human anatomy laboratory, we contrasted<br>this perspective with the idea that Jigsaw’s two-group composition actually elicits a mix of opposing<br>social-psychological processes and outcomes. Supporting this view, students’ perceptions of social interdependence<br>and sociocognitive conflict regulation covaried over time with each other and with motivation and<br>achievement. Likewise, rather than solely elicit cooperation, Jigsaw students initially reported higher levels of<br>competition and individualistic efforts than students in a business-as-usual (BAU) control, and lower levels of<br>epistemic regulation. These trends then reversed over time, but the magnitude of increasing cooperation and<br>decreasing competition and individualistic efforts among Jigsaw students never exceeded that of BAU<br>students. In fact, at the end of the semester, the only significant differences between Jigsaw and BAU were<br>for relational regulation and academic achievement. Overall, these findings provide a much more complete but<br>complicated portrait of Jigsaw social psychology and its effects over time, and so doing indicate that theory<br>development is needed to account for mixed-motive situations that simultaneously elicit cooperative, competitive,<br>and individualistic goals and different forms of sociocognitive conflict regulation. For practice,<br>findings also suggest that simply distributing resources among jigsaw group members does not result in<br>optimal outcomes, and consequently Jigsaw must change in ways that strengthen positive interdependence and<br>decrease social comparison.