Research on the educational outcomes of cooperative learning strategies suggests that educators can "have their cake and eat it too" since these strategies have been found to promote simultaneously high achievement, constructive student-student relationships, positive attitudes toward subject areas, continuing education, critical thinking, cooperative tendencies, and psychological health. Cooperative strategies can eliminate the necessity of choosing between strategies which promote either academic achievement or cognitive development and socialization. This paper reviews the research on the relative impact of cooperative, competitive, individualistic, and traditional instructional methods on a wide range of eduational outcomes. Results of meta-analysis of the available research on two of the most frequent dependent variables in this education research, i.e., achievement and interpersonal relationships, are reported in detail including among others the use of higher quality reasoning strategies, higher level cognitive processing, mastery of social competencies, and development of sex-role identity. Major approaches to the development of cooperative learning strategies are described including:(1) direct application where specific curriculum procedures are used; and (2) conceptual application using general procedures and principles to formulate a unique set of instructional procedures. The immediate future directions of the research efforts on cooperation and schooling are discussed and problems with previous research are outlined. (JAC)