Using Theories of Social Exchange and Status Construction in Mixed-Group Cooperative Learning Practices

Inequalities in the classroom often reflect broader societal biases and prejudices, in part because they are reproduced through everyday interactions amongst students and instructors. Students in groups make rapid judgments about who is competent, who should lead, and who can be ignored. These judgments can map onto status distinctions like race and gender, turning active learning groups into sites that reify rather than challenge broader inequalities. Researchers and practitioners often look to intergroup contact theory (IGCT) when designing interventions to reduce prejudice in the classroom. The theory proposes that contact between different groups is most effective under conditions of equal status, common goals, cooperation, and institutional support. Yet these conditions are not self-executing: IGCT describes the qualities of ideal contact but does not explain the micro-level interactional mechanisms that produce such contact in classroom groups. Nor does it clearly explain when and how positive interactions between dissimilar peers may lead to more than ephemeral changes in cooperation and prejudice-reduction – that is, when intergroup exchanges may alter the status beliefs and performance expectations that students bring into future interactions beyond the classroom. Sociological theories of social commitment and status construction help clarify these processes and offer a ground-up basis for strategies that can heighten intergroup cooperation while reducing status-related biases within, and perhaps beyond, interactions in the classroom. In this article, we link the Theory of Social Commitments (TOSC) and Status Construction Theory (SCT) to IGCT to show how instructors can reorganize intergroup contact through intentional learning group composition, interdependent tasks, and feedback that both rewards cooperation and makes bias-disconfirming competence observable.