Relating Goal Structures to Other Classroom Processes

Abstract

This chapter describes one way in which future research might increase our understanding of how goal-structuring interventions are related to basic classroom achievement and classroom social interaction processes in heterogeneous classrooms. It proposes a merging of nonexperimental data-analysis techniques with experimental or quasi-experimental treatments. By merging the two approaches and collecting the data necessary for each, researchers should be able to examine the ways in which cooperative learning interventions impact basic educational processes. For example, goal-structuring interventions could possibly affect outcomes by mediating the effects of variables that are part of achievement processes, enhancing the impact of variables already present in the classroom, or injecting new sources of influence into the classroom. Of these alternatives, the middle one might be viewed as the most interesting, for it is intriguing to think of cooperative learning as a catalyst that triggers a reaction from variables that are commonly present in contact situations. Least interesting is the notion of cooperative learning interventions’ acting as mediating variables, for if such interventions merely mediate effects already present, their impact on classroom processes could not be very great.