Promoting cooperative skills within mixed-ability groups using interdependent rewards

Abstract

With the growing interest to incorporate cooperative learning in higher education as a method of more opportunities, motivating students of different abilities to really cooperate is becoming one of the major challenges. In many cooperative groups, there are dominators and/or free riders. This limits groupmates’ interdependence or, even worse, creates negative interdependence among them. Therefore, it becomes very crucial for university teachers, who are wishing to implement formal cooperative learning, to establish the educational as well as the social environment that helps students with different abilities to develop their interpersonal skills necessary to cooperate effectively. The current study straddles the social motivational and social cohesion perspectives on cooperative learning. It aims at investigating the comparative impact of two different reward pedagogies on the development of interpersonal cooperative skills within mixed-ability groups. The study was conducted with thirty-nine EFL students arrayed into heterogeneous level teams that engaged in Group Investigation method within an Algerian university context. While task interdependence was symmetrically established in the two experimental groups, reward interdependence was manipulated over two levels: interdependent-shared reward pedagogy and interdependent-individualistic reward pedagogy. T-test results of a self-report cooperative skills scale supported the hypothesis; Interdependent-individualistic reward pedagogy better promoted cooperative skills than did interdependent-shared reward pedagogy.