Jigsaw Classroom Technique

The jigsaw classroom technique restructures traditional classrooms to engineer reductions in tensions between groups of students and to improve academic performance. It is the clearest and most potent operationalization of the contact hypothesis, which itself is social psychology's preeminent theoretical perspective on reducing intergroup hostilities. This entry describes the jigsaw classroom technique's historical and theoretical context, as well as the implementation, outcomes, and evaluations of the technique.

Social psychology has long been concerned with understanding prejudice and working toward its reduction and elimination. Gordon Allport's 1954 volume, The Nature of Prejudice, provided the landmark social psychological analysis of prejudice and its etiology, as well as a framework—the contact hypothesis—for developing interventions to reduce prejudice and intergroup hostilities. The contact hypothesis asserts that prejudice and intergroup conflict may be reduced by giving conflicting groups equal status, common goals to pursue, no competition along group lines, and the sanction of relevant authorities. All four conditions must be satisfied; otherwise intergroup conflict may be exacerbated rather than ameliorated.

Coinciding with Allport's 1954 book was the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which was intended to end state-sanctioned segregation in U.S. schools. This court-ordered desegregation led to significant conflict in U.S. school systems, as some school districts fought in courts and elsewhere to avoid desegregation. One school system, in Austin, Texas, was closed in 1971 because of the extent of the conflict over desegregation. This led to psychologist Elliot Aronson being asked to devise an intervention to reduce the hostility wracking the system, and to the development of the jigsaw classroom technique as such an intervention.

Because of housing segregation, desegregation of schools was being achieved by busing children across neighborhoods into different schools to achieve a racial mix within each school. Aronson and his colleagues noted that classrooms are typically very competitive environments. Minority group children were systematically disadvantaged in those competitive environments because of the accumulative effects of previous segregation and disadvantage. The rewards in a traditional classroom, such as good grades, praise from the teacher, and the esteem of fellow students, are scarce, are usually controlled by the teacher, and are obtained competitively. This microcosm of the classroom violated the conditions of the contact hypothesis.

The jigsaw technique changes the structure, and consequently the interactional dynamics, of the classroom to meet the conditions of the contact hypothesis. However, it does not vary the curriculum to be taught, and it still allows the assessment of individual students' academic performance. The technique is typically applied in classrooms containing students from a diversity of racial and ethnic backgrounds. This involves dividing the whole class into jigsaw groups of about six students, with each group capturing the diversity of the broader classroom and of academic talents. Each student in a jigsaw group is also a member of a separate expert group.

The material for the lesson is divided into six pieces. For example, if the lesson is on the life and times of Albert Schweitzer, the material to be covered is divided into six parts—Schweitzer's childhood, his work as a missionary, and so on. Each expert group is provided with one of the six parts of the day's lesson. Children in each expert group learn their material together, with help from the teacher, before reconvening in their jigsaw groups. These students each have a unique set of information, and they now have to teach their fellow jigsaw group members what they learned in the expert group. The lesson ends with a test—an individual, not a group test of the whole lesson (in this case, of all six parts of the lesson on the life and times of Albert Schweitzer).

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