Many educators express discomfort with using group goals and individual accountability to manipulate motivation to achieve. Teachers often complain of the record keeping involved, and some voice philosophical objections to the idea of using extrinsic rewards to motivate learning. Such concerns raise the question of whether group goals and individual accountability are always necessary and, indeed, whether such goal structures are detrimental to continued learning.
Before exploring this question, it is important to make clear the theoretical rationale for the importance of group goals and individual accountability. This combination is designed principally to motivate students not only to work together but also to be concerned about the learning of their group mates. The assumption is that although group mates may readily interact with and help each other, without appropriate structuring this interaction and help may take the form of sharing answers or doing each other’s work, rather than making certain that group mates understand the material and can independently solve problems. In cooperative learning techniques in which groups are rewarded based on the individual learning of each member, the group members want to succeed. The only way that they can make this happen is to teach and assess one another and to make certain that every group member can independently show mastery of
whatever the group is studying.
Those opposed to using group goals and individual accountability in cooperative learning warn of possible costs of using rewards in classrooms. A few reviewers (e.g., Damon, 1984; Kohn, 1986) have recommended against the use of group rewards, fearing that they may undermine long-term motivation. There is little empirical evidence of undermining effects resulting from the use of group goals and individual accountability. Chapman (2001), noting that it would be “difficult to justify the use of a procedure that impacted positively on student achievement but negatively on their affective response to the subject matter”, measured students’ affective reactions to the lesson content and subject matter used in 10 studies that compared group goals and individual accountability to other incentive structures and found no evidence that the use of group goals and individual accountability had negative effects on student self-reports of subject-related attitudes. In some cases, students’ attitudes were significantly more positive. This goal structure certainly does not undermine long-term achievement. Among multiyear studies, methods that incorporate group rewards based on individual learning performance have consistently shown continued or enhanced achievement gains over time (Calderón, Hertz-Lazarowitz, & Slavin, 1998; Greenwood, Delquadri,&Hall, 1989; Stevens&Slavin, 1995a, 1995b). In contrast, multiyear studies of methods lacking group rewards found few achievement effects in the short or long term (Solomon, Watson, Schaps, Battistich, & Solomon, 1990; Talmage, Pascarella, & Ford, 1984).
The rationale that assumes a cost to be incurred for using group goals and individual accountability is not well articulated in the literature but seems to derive from the ongoing debate over the relationship among reinforcement, reward, and students’ intrinsic motivation. A 1994 meta-analysis (Cameron & Pierce, 1994), which supported earlier assertions that, overall, reward does not decrease students’ intrinsic motivation, sparked considerable debate (Cameron & Pierce, 1996; Deci, Koestner, & Ryan, 1999; Lepper, Henderlong, & Gingras, 1999; Lepper, Keavney, & Drake, 1996). However, insofar as the use of the specific goal structure that combines group goals and individual accountability is concerned, there is little empirical evidence of these undermining effects. Moreover, the pervasive use of extrinsic incentives in elementary and secondary schools with or without cooperative learning makes the question largely moot.
A more pertinent question is whether extrinsic incentives should be given at the group and individual level or only at the individual level (as is current practice in virtually all classrooms in existence). It remains incumbent on theorists who oppose these methods to develop and demonstrate consistent, substantial, and enduring achievement benefits of cooperative learning or other learning models that do not use this goal structure. For now, the preponderance of evidence indicates that the combination of cooperative learning strategies with group goals and individual accountability is a practical, feasible, and effective method of enhancing students’ academic achievement.
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