Knowledge Building Discourse in Peer-Led Team Learning (PLTL) Groups in First-Year General Chemistry
To better understand the interactional mechanisms that make PLTL effective, we closely examined videotapes of two PLTL groups as they both solved the same chemistry problem. In one group, students engaged in group knowledge building: intellectual conversa
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Knowledge Building Discourse in Peer-Led Team Learning (PLTL) Groups in First-Year General Chemistry Keith Sawyer, Regina Frey, and Patrick Brown
Introduction Although we know that cooperative techniques enhance student learning in PLTL, and more broadly in undergraduate chemistry courses, previous studies (reviewed in the corresponding dataset description chapter) have not investigated the interactional mechanisms that account for students’ improved academic performance from cooperative learning in General Chemistry. In (Brown, Sawyer, & Frey, 2010), we examined the influence of peer-leader discourse in PLTL in General Chemistry. We showed that a peer leader’s interactional style (whether instructional or facilitative) influenced student discussions. When a peer leader’s interactional style was almost entirely facilitative, the students’ discourse was characterized by longer chains of student-to-student conversations and more equal student participation. Conversely, when peer leaders used equal amounts of instructional and facilitative discourse, students consistently demonstrated unequal participation and engaged in mostly short chains of interactions. This finding corroborates a number of K-12 studies that have shown that teachers play a pivotal role in both enabling and constraining student discourse (Carlsen, 1993; Crawford, 2005; Hanrahan, 2005; Kelly, Brown, & Crawford, 2000; Klaassen & Lijnse, 1996; van Zee, Iwasyk, Kurose, Simpson, & Wild, 2001; van Zee & Minstrell, 1997). In this chapter, we build on the above findings by presenting detailed analyses of how the conversation unfolds across two extended problem-solving sessions. One of the sessions is led by a peer leader with a largely facilitative style, and the K. Sawyer (*) University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA e-mail: [email protected] R. Frey Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA P. Brown DuBray Middle School, Fort Zumwalt School District, St Peters, MO, USA D.D. Suthers et al. (eds.), Productive Multivocality in the Analysis of Group Interactions, Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning Series 16, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-8960-3_10, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
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other by a peer leader with a roughly balanced use of facilitative and instructive styles. The major research questions we address in this study are: (1) How are students’ contributions responsive to those of other students? (2) What types of collaborative discourse practices are used by students working in small groups that lead to building knowledge of chemistry content? (3) What peer leader actions facilitate student collaborative discourse?
The Five Dimensions Characterizing Our Approach 1. Theoretical assumptions. We take a broadly positivist and realist approach: We maintain that individual phenomena, such as conceptual change, and social phenomena, such as conversation, are real and exist in the world, and can be studied objectively. We maintain that learning occurs at both the individual and the socia
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