How well does "Jigsaw Learning" work?

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 .

Making Cooperative Learning Work Better

“Making Cooperative Learning Work Better” by Jennifer Gonzalez in Cult of Pedagogy, February 3, 2020, https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/making-cooperative-learning-work-better/

Here's Marshall Memo (#823) summary of the information:

            In this Cult of Pedagogy article, Jennifer Gonzalez recalls that when she was a middle-school English teacher, she often had students work in groups – sometimes to brainstorm ideas, sometimes as a break from the whole-class routine, and, she confesses, sometimes to lighten her grading load (30 final products versus 120).

            But cooperative work was not without its problems. Some groups didn’t stay on task, there were personality clashes, absences complicated things, and certain students ended up doing most of the work in their groups. Gonzalez began to question whether cooperative learning was adding value. Recently, she took a careful look at the research and reached out to colleagues to answer some basic questions.

            First, is cooperative learning worth it? Researchers say that it is. “In general,” summarizes Gonzalez, “when students work together, they make greater academic and social gains than when they compete against one another or when they work individually.” But cooperative learning produces these gains only when teachers orchestrate group activities to include these key elements:

-    Positive interdependence – Kids must work together to achieve a common goal.

-    Individual accountability – Each group member must do his or her part.

-    Supportiveness – Students help and encourage each other.

-    Developing interpersonal skills – Students are taught how to communicate, tackle problems, and resolve conflicts.

-    Processing – Students have time to reflect on their group’s interactions.

Implemented with these components, cooperative learning works, and it’s especially important given the demands of the 21st-century workplace, where communication, creativity, and collaboration are more important than ever. What’s more, says Gonzalez, contemporary Americans’ fixation on smartphones “is stunting our ability to have regular conversations and robbing us of all the gifts that come with those interactions. Giving students regular opportunities to share physical space and actually talk through complex problems is a gift they may not get anywhere else, so yes, it’s worth it.”

            Having established the value of cooperative work in classrooms, Gonzalez reached out for solutions to four common challenges:

            • Problem #1: Uneven student contributions in groups – Quite frequently, academically stronger students do most of the work while others freeload. Or everyone works, but in “parallel play” mode, without truly collaborating. Teachers can address this problem by:

- Explicitly teaching the skills required to work well in a group. This means doing role-plays, modeling desired behaviors, and demonstrating what not to do. “Do not assume students have already been taught how to collaborate or that they should know better,” says Gonzalez. She advises starting with simple group tasks and debriefing with students. The links in her full article below include a breakdown of skills and rubrics to evaluate group work.

- Structuring the learning task so it lends itself to collaboration. Gonzalez provides links to resources for these approaches:

-    Jigsaw, in which each group member learns a discrete body of information and is then responsible for teaching it to the rest of the group.

-    Solve in Time, in which students clearly define a problem, research and understand it, come up with a solution, and share their work.

-    Kagan Cooperative Learning Structures, including Quiz-Quiz-Trade and Numbered Heads Together.

-    Team-based learning, popular in medical schools but applicable in K-12.

-    Agile Project Management, breaking large projects into shorter cycles.

-    POGIL (Process-Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning), often used in science courses.

It’s also important for the teacher to set norms and expectations up front (which might involve students creating group contracts before they get to work), spelling out procedures and roles, and what to do when there are serious disagreements.

            • Problem #2: Interpersonal conflicts – Researchers have found that psychological safety is an essential prerequisite for successful group work, so it’s wise to spend time developing a comfortable group dynamic before students tackle academic tasks. Gonzalez suggests surveying students ahead of time (to avoid personality clashes that might derail a group), doing team-building activities, surveying students in the middle of multi-day cooperative projects, and actively problem-solving when issues arise (perhaps changing groups or having some students work independently).

            • Problem #3: Off-task behavior – This might be excessive chit-chat, kids on their devices, or just plain fooling around. Gonzalez suggests establishing check-ins when specific tasks must be completed, using a timer for completion of certain tasks, and the teacher being self-critical about an assignment that confuses or doesn’t engage students, leading to a mid-course correction.

            • Problem #4: Student absences throwing things off – “One missed day is usually not a big deal,” says Gonzalez, “but if a student misses multiple work days when the group should be actively collaborating, it becomes much harder for that person to make an equal contribution.” Her suggestions:

-    Design group projects so some parts require everyone’s involvement and others are done by individuals and collaboration might be “nice to have” rather than “must have.”

-    Be clear about individual roles and responsibilities so if a student has been absent, it’s clear what he or she must do to catch up.

-    Have groups use Google Drive or Hyperdoc, keeping the work in one cloud-accessible place so it’s possible for an absent student to contribute from home.

-    Let groups use Skype, Facetime, or Google Hangouts to chat with an absent student.

-    If a long-term absence is holding a group back, reshuffle groups or have the absent student work individually.

Gonzalez concludes with three practical tips:

-    Conduct cooperative projects in the classroom. Differences in students’ access to materials, technology, and transportation may create inequities if major collaboration is done outside of school.

-    Limit groups to 3-4 students. “Once a group gets larger than four,” says Gonzalez, “it becomes easier for students to slip through the cracks.”

-    Check out collaborative technology. Beyond Google’s tools, there are collaborative features in Trello, Asana, Kanbanchi, Slack, Wakelet, and Canvas.