From Marshall Memo 1099
Jigsaw Learning – How Well Does It Work?
In this Review of Educational Research article, Eva Vives (Ghent University) and six
co-authors report on their meta-analysis of jigsaw, a cooperative learning strategy developed in
the 1970s by Elliot Aronson and colleagues at the University of Texas (details at the Jigsaw
Classroom website ). Here is the most common jigsaw sequence:
- The class is divided into groups.
- Curriculum content is split into the same number of segments as students per group.
- For example, with a lesson on Eleanor Roosevelt and 5-student groups: her childhood,
family life, life after FDR’s polio, as First Lady, and her career after FDR’s death.
- In each group, students are assigned different segments and silently study material on it.
- The class reshuffles into “expert groups” for the segments, and each discusses its
portion and rehearses how it will be presented back in their home groups.
- The original groups reconvene and each “expert” presents their segment in sequence.
- The teacher circulates to monitor and intervene as needed.
- If all students do their job, each group puts together the jigsaw of the whole lesson.
- All students are assessed on their knowledge of the lesson’s content.
Advocates of jigsaw learning believe it has these key attributes: students are more
actively involved than in a standard teacher-centered class; every student takes responsibility
for curriculum content; students teach each other; students work together to reach the learning
goal; and students get practice on collaboration and social-emotional skills.
How effective is jigsaw learning? Vives and her colleagues did a comprehensive review
of 40 years of research and found mixed results depending on the curriculum area and how
well it was implemented. Their conclusions:
• “The introduction of social interdependence in the classroom,” say the researchers, “can
have positive effects on both academic and psychological outcomes.” Students from
elementary grades through college liked jigsaw as a classroom process.
• The most positive academic results were in language arts and social sciences classes,
somewhat less positive in STEM and vocational classes. Academic gains from jigsaw lessons
were more long-lasting than from standard instruction. A key factor in stickiness seemed to be
the “desirable difficulty” involved in the expert phase – the challenge for students being
responsible for studying their content, understanding it, and presenting to peers.
• Some studies found that jigsaw resulted in a high cognitive load on students as they
studied their portion and presented it to peers. Interestingly, the cognitive load was higher in
jigsaw lessons than in a conventionally taught classroom, even though each student was
responsible for only a fraction of the lesson content. Learning depended on groupmates’ skill at
learning and presenting the material.
• Jigsaw lessons had positive psychosocial effects, including students’ motivation and
feeling of competence. Jigsaw’s impact was mixed on boosting student self-esteem and
reducing prejudice. Oddly, there has been little research on how well jigsaw lessons developed
cooperation skills.
“The jigsaw method,” say Vives et al., “confronts students with both a cultural and a
cognitive challenge that requires students to learn how to function in such a pedagogical
environment, in addition to learning their course materials. Such learning may take time.”
That’s why jigsaw is challenging for teachers. Many schools don’t have a culture of
cooperation, and students may not have the social skills to work cooperatively, aren’t used to
being dependent on one another, and may lack the cognitive skills to take responsibility for a
piece of the curriculum and teach it to classmates. Jigsaw lessons were most effective, the
researchers found, when teachers took the time to explicitly teach the cooperative and
cognitive skills involved in the process.
Vives and colleagues believe jigsaw learning may be especially important as digital tools
become more prominent. “Digital technologies,” they say, “offer unprecedented opportunities
for collaborative learning and real-time support for class management (e.g., forming student
groups, monitoring the engagement of learning, deciding when and how to intervene in their
learning activities…). However, as sophisticated as they can be, the digital tools in support of
collaborative learning methods can only be effective if the methods themselves are well
understood and guided by a detailed knowledge of the cognitive and socio-cognitive processes
they activate… We have never needed this knowledge so much.”
“Learning with Jigsaw: A Systematic Review Gathering All the Pieces of the Puzzle More
Than 40 Years Later” by Eva Vives, Céline Poletti, Anaïs Robert, Fabrizio Butera, Pascal
Huguet, ProFAN Consortium, and Isabelle Régner in Review of Educational Research, June
2025 (Vol. 95, #3, pp. 339-384); Vives can be reached at eva.vives13@gmail.com .
