Group Grade Grubbing versus Cooperative Learning.

E ven before the recent surge of interest in cooperative learning (CL), researchers and practition ers were already staking out positions on precisely what the term denotes and how the idea should be imple mented Constructive controversies (or, less charitably, factional disputes) have arisen with respect to almost every aspect of CI, theory and practice Everyone in the field agrees that stu dents benefit when they can help each other learn instead of having to work against each other or apart from each other; beyond this, unanimity is in short supply. What should be one of the central areas of discussion, however, has not yet received the attention it deserves I refer to the prominent role assigned to grades, awards, certificates, and other rewards in many of the CL mod els now being offered to teachers While some approaches incorporate these rewards without calling atten tion to that fact, others assert that rewards are the linchpin of cooper ation Some writers even go so far as to use the phrases "cooperative goals" and "cooperative reward structures" interchangeably Most researchers would agree, I think, that effective CL depends on helping students to develop what the social psychologist Morton Dcutsch (1949) called "promotive interdepen dence," in which the goals of group members are positively linked and their interactions are characterized by mutual facilitation (Counterbalancing this in most versions of CL is some feature to assure individual account ability so that each student is held responsible to an external source for participating in the process and for learning) But the assumption that in terdependence is best achieved—or even, as some would have it, that it can only be achieved—by the use of re wards is a claim that demands critical examination. An impressive body of re search in sociaJ psychology has shown that rewards are not only surprisingly limited in their effectiveness but also tend to undermine interest in the task Over the long run, they may actually reduce the quality of many kinds of performance