The Residual Effects of Cooperative-Learning Experiences: A Two-Year Follow-Up

Abstract

The author investigated how training in small-group and interpersonal behaviors affected children's behavior and interactions as they worked in small groups 2 years later. The authors assigned 52 fifth graders, who had been trained 2 years previously in cooperative group behaviors, to the trained condition and 36 fifth graders, who had not previously been trained, to the untrained condition. Both were reconstituted from the pool of students who had participated previously in group activities. The results showed a residual training effect, with the children in the trained groups being more cooperative and helpful than their untrained peers.     

Implementation Effects of a Pre‐service Training Course for Secondary Education Teachers

A quasi‐experimental, treatment‐control group investigation was designed to test the effects of a pre‐service training course for secondary education teachers. Previous findings from teacher effects research and cognitive strategy instruction were translated into two direct instructional models: a model of executive acting directed at well‐structured skills and a model of strategic acting directed at higher‐level thinking strategies. Pre‐ and post‐training comparison of classroom observations by trained observers revealed significantly more effective instruction by the student teachers after training. No treatment effect was found for pupil engagement rates. The ratings from the supervising teachers did not show significantly better use of the recommended instructional skills by the trained student teachers than by the untrained student teachers.     

Developing a Collegial Approach to Initial Teacher Education: the Westminster B.Ed Primary Internship Project

This paper describes Hong Kong research into peer tutored instruction in reading. Tutors were trained to use Paired Reading, a technique appropriate for use across a range of ability levels, and adaptable for reading instruction in languages and orthographies other than English.

The Hong Kong research confirms that peer tutors can successfully deliver reading instruction, with both tutors and tutees benefiting in terms of enhanced reading proficiency, intrinsic motivation to learn, and self‐concept. It also suggests some factors which may enhance the effects of peer tutoring upon achievement. For tutees these are content coverage, peer self‐concept and intrinsic motivation to study. For tutors the predominant factor is locus‐of‐control.

Interestingly, tutors’ instructional behaviours during tutoring sessions appear not to have any effect on tutoring outcomes, except in so far as they might slow down coverage of the material being read.

     

Changing the Attitudes of Medical School Instructors

Abstract

This study was a four-year follow-up of a study by Ridley and Birney (4) in which college freshmen were tested for the effects of training with task-relevant strategies and instructions to be creative on Guilford’s Alternate Uses Test (AUT). Fifty subjects who participated in the first study, now seniors, were retested on the AUT and asked to produce a statement of strategies which they believed facilitate performance. Contrary to hypothesis, trained subjects could not be distinguished by their statements through blind sorting. However, AUT results suggested that the instructional set to be creative was easily restored, producing greater originality in untrained subjects while interacting with training to produce lower originality scores. The need for current rehearsal of strategies and the importance of sensitizing subjects to the role of strategies in unfamiliar tasks were discussed.     

Contexts for Remedial Reading: Practice Reading and Pause,Prompt and Praise tutoring

Abstract Fourteen residential childcare workers were trained to implement both a Practice Reading and the Pause, Prompt and Praise remedial reading procedures in school and cottage settings with 18 low‐progress readers of primary school age. Pause, Prompt and Praise procedures were introduced in each setting only if readers made insufficient progress with Practice Reading alone. Childcare workers displayed major change in their tutoring behaviour between baseline (untrained tutoring) conditions and trained tutoring conditions (Practice Reading or Pause, Prompt and Praise). Readers who received a six week programme of individual reading assistance made significant gains on standardised tests of reading accuracy and comprehension and made accelerated progress through graded book levels, while children in the comparison group did not. Results are discussed in terms of the interactive social contexts provided by the two procedures and of the opportunities for reciprocal gains in skill between readers and tutors with the Pause, Prompt and Praise procedures.     

At a first glance – How reliable and valid is the thin slices technique to assess instructional quality?

Various approaches of assessing instructional quality have emerged in educational research. In this article, we present two studies that apply the thin slices procedure, investigating the reliability and validity of the ratings of three dimensions of instructional quality based solely on the first impressions of untrained social observers. Thirty undergraduate students rated 30-s clips from English lessons (Study 1) and Math lessons (Study 2) regarding three quality dimensions. The findings suggest high reliability in these ratings. Multilevel confirmatory analyses suggested construct validity in terms of differentiation between the three dimensions of instructional quality. Finally, we found some overlap between the thin slices ratings of classroom management and constructive support with ratings of trained raters based on observations of full lessons, as well as students’ ratings of these dimensions. We discuss these results with respect to the potential of first impressions of untrained observers to measure instructional quality.     

Students’ Differentiation of Reader-Based and Text-Based Questions

Abstract

This study examined the number of text lookbacks encouraged by tutors, appropriate text sampling, and the use of other strategic text behaviors (i.e., rewording, segmenting, and commenting). Eighty pairs of students, (one fifth-grade tutor and one third-grade confederate) worked with an expository text passage; an investigator observed and noted anv evidence of the strategic behaviors while the confederate was answering five questions with the tutor’s assistance. It was expected that there would be good comprehender (40 tutors)-poor comprehender (the other 40 tutors) differences among the strategic behaviors. A series of analyses of variance were performed on the observational notation data; significant differences by reader proficiency level were found for all three strategies being studied. The use of a confederate in the tutoring role is proposed as a means of reducing tutee confounding.     

School Finance in Iowa

Abstract

This study examined the effect of pupil reading miscues and achievement levels on the prompting decisions of their tutors. Tutors were randomly assigned to high, medium, and low level readers. Subsequent analyses of tutor prompts revealed that the poorer readers received disproportionately more prompts than the better readers. Furthermore, teachers differentially responded to pupil errors on the basis of each miscue’s semantic acceptability. These results suggest that teachers were actively engaged in the process of decision making, and that pupil traits affected teacher behavior and teacher prompting decisions.     

Ethical Practices in the Provision of Guidance by Further Education Health Care Tutors who hold a Nursing,Midwifery or Health Visiting Qualification

This paper seeks to establish what constitutes ethical practice in the provision of guidance by Further Education health care tutors who hold a nursing, midwifery or health visiting qualification and are therefore bound by the United Kingdom Central Council for Nursing, Midwifery and Health Visiting (UKCC) Code of Professional Conduct. It considers potential ethical dilemmas which such tutors may encounter during guidance activities, in the context of the UKCC standards and the five key ethical principles of autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, justice and veracity. Whilst these professional standards and principles may appear to provide a comprehensive foundation for ethical guidance practice, in reality they fail to offer clear support in the resolution of many of the ethical dilemmas that face health care tutors undertaking guidance work. Since guidance provided by such tutors may not be fully impartial, the importance of 'ethical sensitivity' and ethical decision-making skills are also highlighted.     

Cross-age tutoring: how to promote tutees’ active knowledge-building

Cross-age tutoring is characterised by status and age differences between tutors and tutees. Tutees are often inactive in this setting, because responsibility for effective learning is transferred to the more experienced tutors. This study focused on improving the outcomes of cross-age tutoring for tutees by providing tutors with a tutor training session that emphasised knowledge-building instead of knowledge-telling. The tutors learned to encourage tutees’ autonomy, competence and active knowledge construction. In a quasi-experimental design, an experimental group of 74 tutors, who were 8th-grade secondary school students, received the tutor training in knowledge-building, and a control group of 82 tutors received no training. The students in both groups subsequently tutored 583 3rd-grade primary school students in small groups on elementary aspects of electric circuits. The tutoring process was videotaped and coded. Trained tutors showed more knowledge-building and less knowledge-telling behaviour. In the tutoring interaction with trained tutors, tutees showed more active behaviour and tutors showed more restrained behaviour. Tutees coached by trained tutors reported more experiences of autonomy, competence, and intrinsic motivation and learned more than tutees instructed by untrained tutors. The study showed that cross-age tutoring can be improved by providing tutors with training that focused on knowledge-building.     

Tutor learning: the role of explaining and responding to questions

Previous research on peer tutoring has found that students sometimes benefit academically from tutoring other students. In this study we combined quantitative and qualitative analyses to explore how untrained peer tutors learned via explaining and responding to tutee questions in a non-reciprocal tutoring setting. In support of our hypotheses, we found that tutors learned most effectively when their instructional activities incorporated reflective knowledge-building in which they monitored their own understanding, generated inferences to repair misunderstandings, and elaborated upon the source materials. However, tutors seemed to adopt a knowledge-telling bias in which they primarily summarized the source materials with little elaboration. Tutors’ reflective knowledge-building activities, when they occurred, were more frequently elicited by interactions with their tutee. In particular, when tutees asked questions that contained an inference or required an inferential answer, tutors’ responses were more likely to be elaborative and metacognitive. Directions for future research are also discussed.     

Self-Appraisal of Advanced Degree Candidates

Abstract

This study examined the influence of the incorporation of set induction into teacher’s instructional strategies upon pupil achievement and pupil perception of teacher effectiveness. One hundred and eighty ninth-grade pupils were randomly divided into eighteen groups of ten each. Eighteen pre-service teachers were assigned to these groups. One half of this teacher population was given instruction in the skill of incorporation of set induction in their instructional strategies and one half served as a control group. Data was gathered by administering pre-post test in achievement and Teacher Demonstration Rating Forms and was analyzed by an analysis of variance. The results supported previous research in the area of teacher effectiveness and indicated that set induction is an important variable in the determination of student achievement.     

The developing educator: from novice to expert in Agricultural Education

Summary

The paper raises questions about how inexperienced lecturers (whether initially trained or untrained) develop a mastery of skills within their chosen profession. To do this, an analysis of what constitutes ‘mastery’ is needed. This is borrowed from the work of Schon (1983 and 1987) on the reflective practitioner, and of the Dreyfus brothers (1986) on human intuition and expertise. The paper next reports the results and tentative conclusions of a small-scale study in May–June 1996 of how long it has taken for 20 agricultural educators in six British Colleges of Agriculture to have developed their skills from their teaching experience, and their perceptions of the influences which have facilitated or inhibited that process.     

Behavioural Peer Tutoring: training 16‐year‐old tutors to employ the ‘pause,prompt and praise’ method with 12‐year‐old remedial readers

Abstract Eight 16‐year‐old, low achieving pupils were trained to tutor reading using the ‘Pause, Prompt and Praise’ method. The effectiveness of training such tutors was investigated through a tutorial programme in which these eight older pupils tutored eight 12‐year‐old remedial children who were retarded in reading. The programme consisted of 24 tutorial sessions conducted over eight weeks. Two matched control groups of remedial readers were also included in the experiment. One consisted of eight pupils tutored by a group of eight untrained tutors who tutored during the same sessions using the same materials. The second control group consisted of a third group of remedial readers who read silently, without a tutor. The experimental group of tutees, who had a mean pre‐test reading age of 8 years 4 months, made a mean gain of 6 months in reading accuracy by the end of the programme. The tutees of control group I who had received tutoring from untrained tutors made a mean gain of 2.4 months. The pupils of control group II who read silently without a tutor made a mean gain of 1.8 months. Analysis of covariance showed the gains of the experimental group to be statistically significantly different from the gains of the two control groups.     

A Method for Computing Accomplishment Quotients on the High-School and College Levels

Abstract

The study investigates relationships among pupil reading behaviors and teacher responses with a sample of 106 primary grade readers. With student background traits such as sex and prior reading achievement controlled, seven different reading behaviors and pupil responses accounted for significant increases in the prediction of teacher behaviors. Pupil reading behaviors had the greatest effect on teacher corrections and word pronunciations. Conversely, pupil background factors had the greatest association with the length of reading assigned and the numbers of grapho- phonemic and prereading cues teachers provided. In view of the findings, the authors suggest that future study of classroom interaction examine the notion that teacher expectations may be at least partially due to then- responses to specific aspects of pupil behavior.     

Annual Index Volume 75, 1981-82

Abstract

This study was designed to investigate whether teachers who receive training and then implement more effective instructional practices change in terms of the reasons they offer for their effectiveness. Comparisons were made between 46 teachers who were trained in and implemented mastery learning techniques and 50 similar teachers who could not be included in the training. The results of a multivariate analysis of variance showed that the mastery learning teachers attached increased importance to teaching practices and behaviors in explaining their effectiveness after they had implemented these techniques. Furthermore, there was a significant reduction in the importance mastery learning teachers attached to personality factors. The implications of these findings for staff development are discussed.     

A distributed collaborative science learning laboratory on the internet

Abstract

A Distributed Collaborative Science Learning Laboratory (DCSLL) was designed, prototyped, and pilot‐tested as the “Electrical Circuit Simulator.” This laboratory was part of a module on electricity within an introductory distance course for postsecondary students on the scientific method. The concept of DCSLL emerged from work in distance education and new technologies, cooperative/collaborative learning, and science education. Instructional design principles derived from these areas are presented, and their implementation in the DCSLL is described, followed by results from the pilot test. Analysis of the results led to the articulation of six instructional design guidelines, identified as being key to the development of such learning environments.     

Individual differences: Either relational learning or item-specific learning in a same/different task

Three pigeons were trained in a three-item simultaneous same/different task. Three of six stimulus combinations were not trained (untrained set) and were tested later. Following acquisition, the subjects were tested with novel stimuli, the untrained set, training-stimulus inversions, and object shape and color manipulations. There was no novel-stimulus transfer—that is, no abstract-concept learning. Two pigeons showed partial transfer to untrained pairs and good transfer to stimulus inversions, suggesting that they had learned the relationship between the stimuli. Lack of transfer by the third pigeon suggests item-specific learning. The somewhat surprising finding of relational learning by 2 pigeons with only six training pairs suggests restricted-domain relational learning that was controlled more by color than by shape features. Individual differences of item-specific learning by 1 pigeon and relational learning by 2 others demonstrate that this task can be learned in different ways and that relational learning can occur in the absence of novel-stimulus transfer.     

Linking learning theories and learning difficulties

Abstract

Developing effective strategies to support secondary students with learning difficulties is important because they are the most prevalent students with special educational needs in contemporary mainstream classes. A learner‐focused instructional approach that incorporates meaning‐making, student control, and acceptance of errors, combined with explicit instruction will facilitate the learning of students with learning difficulties. This approach derives from an instructional setting model of learning difficulties, as distinct from a deficit model or an inefficient learner model, and draws on principles from constructivist learning theory and whole language theory. Guided by this model and these principles, secondary teachers can design curricula and classroom environments that support the needs of all students.