Jigsaw cooperative learning in engineering classrooms

Jigsaw is a cooperative style of learning that has been around for more than four decades. Started as a technique for bridging ethnic boundaries and including minorities gently within the crowd, Jigsaw is now seen as one of the very effective techniques of student-centered learning, team-based learning, and project-based learning. Most of the successful stories on Jigsaw come from the fields of social and humanitarian sciences and K-12 education. Only recently there have been some pilot studies on the application of Jigsaw to university level engineering courses. For the application of Jigsaw in engineering to gain more momentum, the engineering education community has to share their experiences and success, as well as challenging stories in this regard. This paper presents the author's experience with the application of Jigsaw in two formats, subject-based and problem-based. Some preliminary surveys and statistics are presented.