On the Effectiveness of Interteaching.

Abstract

Teaching techniques based on behavior analysis have been available for over 50 years as for example Skinner discussed the strategies for teaching in the classroom (Skinner, 1954). Later techniques such as programmed instruction (Holland & Skinner, 1961), precision teaching (Lindsley, 1964), direct instruction (Engelmann & Carnine, 1982), and PSI or the Keller-plan (Keller, 1968) have been used. However, there has been a decline in the use of such procedures (Lamal, 1984). Some years ago a type of strategy of peer learning or interteaching was described in the behavior analytic literature (Boyce & Hineline, 2002) as ".... mutually probing, mutually informing conversation between two people" (Boyce & Hineline, 2002p. 220). Interteaching is based on principles from the different strategies mentioned above and the main points are: (1) Students have to read the text beforehand, (2) Questions from the text are prepared by the instructor, (3) Students discuss the questions in pairs for 30-45 min, (4) An interteach record is filled out by the students whereby they write down the questions that are difficult, and (5) The instructor prepares a lecture based on the interteach records. Three studies have shown that interteaching is more effective than traditional instructions at improving students learning outcome (Saville & Zinn, 2006, 2009; Saville, Zinn, & Elliot, 2005). Saville et al. (2005) found that students did better on quizzes after interteaching than traditional lectures, reading alone or control. Saville and Zinn (2006) also found that after interteaching students did better on the exams and that students preferred interteaching. However, there have been relatively few reports on the effect of interteaching, so the purpose of the current study was to expand the knowledge by comparing the effect of interteaching with traditional lectures in a group of undergraduate students. Method Participants Sixty-nine undergraduate students from two different classes participated in the current study. Two-thirds of the participants were females and the average age for the whole group of participants was 30 years. The participants were students studying on a bachelor program in social welfare. They were recruited through ads in the class. The classes were not mandatory. Design A pre- post-test design was used. One group of the participants was exposed to interteaching as the first condition and traditional lectures as the second condition. The other group was exposed to the conditions in the reversed order. Procedure Traditional lectures. The lectures were based on previously known learning objectives. The students had the curriculum and some recommended texts. Each lecture lasted for approximately 3-4 hours with 15 minutes breaks. The second author was the instructor Interteaching. The sequence started with a short introductory lecture, maximum 45 minutes, followed by an interteaching sequence of 1-2 hours and finally a lecture of 45 minutes based on the results from the interteaching. In the introductory lecture, the learning objectives were clarified and some examples were given. The intereaching sequence started with students reading a short article from the curriculum that was related to the learning objectives. Subsequently, the students formed pairs and discussed the questions. The instructor, the second author, moved from group to group (3-4 students in each group) answering any questions that the participants had and facilitated group discussion. Furthermore, the participants filled out an interteaching record. The purpose of this record was to help the instructor to identify questions which were difficult for the students. Behavior recorded. We collected data on self-rating of how much knowledge the participants had about the different issues. The participants had to answer nine to eleven specific questions within each area. …