Cooperation, Prosocial Behavior, and Academic Performance: Experiments in the Desegregated Classroom
Author(s)
Aronson, Elliot; Osherow, Neal
Abstract
After observing scores of classrooms anywhere from 30 days to three years after their schools were desegregated, the authors concluded that desegregating a school system does not necessarily mean integrating its students. Students in the classroom may be arbitrarily mixed–teachers often assign seats alphabetically–but when the children get up to talk with their friends, go outside to play, or sit down to eat, they tend to separate along ethnic lines. There is little evidence that desegregation efforts have fulfilled any of the original goals and expectations intentionally set by the Supreme Court when it outlawed school segregation in 1954, such as true integration, reducing racial prejudice, and increasing the self-esteem and academic performance of minority children. In this paper, the authors examine hypotheses to account for the apparent failure; consider changes in the classroom structure and learning process that they consider necessary to achieve those benefits; describe the “jigsaw” technique, an interdependent learning environment that they developed and implemented in order to instill the values and skills of cooperation in its participants; and report the findings and analyze the methodology of research they conducted to evaluate the method’s success.
