In addition to the importance of school goal orientations, the teaching strategies used in adolescents' schools can also have an influence on their achievement motivation. For instance, Nichols (1996) reported that the use of cooperative learning strategies was related to higher endorsement of mastery goals, higher levels of intrinsic motivation, and lower endorsement of performance goals among a small, mostly Caucasian sample of high school students in a suburban midwestern school. Individuals in this study were randomly assigned to participate in a treatment group that learned geometry material through cooperative learning strategies, a second group that received the traditional teaching methods for the school for the first part of the year and cooperative learning strategies for the second, and a third group that was taught the same material using only the traditional teaching methods. The students who received the cooperative learning strategies had higher levels of intrinsic motivation and were less likely to endorse performance goals than their peers who did not receive cooperative learning strategies.