David Arendale: Well, greetings, everyone.
This is David Arendale.
Our purpose of this video is to look at what
are the common elements among most of
the major peer learning programs that operate
inside the United States
and internationally around the world.
Some of these elements will be true of all the programs.
A few of the elements may not be true of every program.
But at least it allows us to have
a basic foundation for
understanding what are the common issues,
what are oftentimes the common parts of the programs,
and also what are some of
the common issues that they're trying to deal with.
These are the six programs
which I follow with my research.
One of the things I'll do with this video is not read
all the words on the PowerPoint slides.
It's a lesson that my students taught me after
years of teaching a introductory global history course.
But what I'm looking for is what are
common elements that help us
to understand these programs better?
In order to go into
more detail about each one of these programs,
I recommend that you go to
this YouTube channel which I set up,
in which I have much more detailed videos
that look at each of these programs.
They're still not perfect.
I'd still recommend that you read
the professional literature for more detail.
But at least inside of these videos,
you'll be able to see more information
about each one of them.
However, I won't spend the time as I do inside
of this video looking at what are the common objectives,
what are the common issues that they're dealing with
because that's what the purpose of this video is for.
First of all, just a quick thought,
how do you select among
this myriad of wonderful
peer learning programs that are out there?
Well, part of the reason why it's so complicated is that
you've got answers to different questions here.
What kinds of resources do you have at
your institution regarding pay,
and resources, and faculty interest,
and available student help?
What's the climate like at your institution?
Some of these programs foster
better in some climates versus others.
What are the specific needs that the students have?
Different programs are more appropriate for
some student populations than
others based off what those particular needs are.
Then once you end up understanding those,
then you're able to go and select
the appropriate intervention program.
I'll have a whole series of
different videos that look at
this whole decision-making process.
Too oftentimes, it's
easy to be influenced when you go to
a conference and you hear
concurrent session talking about a program,
and I'm sure it's a fine program.
I did that for many,
many years promoting one of
the programs that was on that list of six,
which we just saw.
But they don't always tell you all the information.
They don't tell you what are the things that you got to
do in order to make that program really work well.
They only have 60, 75 minutes,
or if you end up looking at an article, well,
part of the challenge with articles,
publications is that
probably half the time in the article,
it's spent on a research study.
They don't always specifically tell you the kind of
detailed information you need in order to implement it.
So that's the reason why I suggest that you be really
careful whenever you're thinking about
a program and being a good consumer.
Now, it's a little humorous to go over
here and pick on Doritos.
But anytime that you eat anything,
we ought to read the label
and the specific product information.
Well, the same thing is true
for whenever you're selecting
a particular intervention program,
you have to go and do deeper research,
look at the fine print.
Frankly, one of the most valuable things you can do
is actually visit a nearby college that has
this particular program and see if
the director of the program could spend
a lunch hour with you or to allow you to
actually go and watch some of the sessions in operation.
That's going to give you the kind of
detailed information that's going to help you to be able
to make a more informed decision on which to pick from.
Well, it's the power of the group.
It is working with other fellow students,
some of them more skilled,
more knowledgeable, more advanced.
But what we understand is that
regardless of what the preparation level is,
students have something to contribute and
that's the reason why groups are so effective.
Just to start off, let me just
start with a little cartoon that
actually has a little more serious import
to it than it might appear.
For a lot of students,
they're all dealing with college by themselves.
It's their own private mazes.
Then at some point, students figure
out ways to get together with each other.
Now, these may be the people who are on
their residence hall floor
or people who they sit next to inside of a class.
Somehow they get together with other students.
Now, some students, they don't get
the opportunity to meet with others
due to their obligations
of time for a variety of reasons.
Now, getting together with others,
that's a good thing.
Hopefully, what you see happen is
that because of them getting together as a group,
it provides a synergistic impact that allows them to be
able to do more than if they were just
working by themselves up there dealing with the maze.
Well, this is actually a much more complex cartoon
than it appears because it
really is part of
why it is that POW groups are effective.
The reason why some POW groups
are more effective than others,
well, it's because of the program and for its protocol.
One of the most influential researchers in
student outcomes is Dr. Alexander Astin,
along with his wife and fellow researcher and
also for all the graduate students
who did their work on the research.
So it was a big team, but I highly
recommend that you end up picking up this book here.
You can probably pick it up used on
Amazon for probably less than five bucks.
It's one of the best research studies that
shows the complexity of the college environment.
He looked at hundreds of variables that had
an impact on students as they came into the institution.
They were experienced while at
the institution and the outcomes
that they experience as a result of
all of that interaction,
and of all of the hundreds and hundreds of variables,
well, the peer group was
the most potent source of influence.
Now, for me as a faculty member,
I find that to be humbling.
I would have thought it would be
the faculty member who would
be the most important influence on them.
Doesn't diminish me as a teacher.
It just reminds me of how impactful the student group is.
Couple more quick quotes here,
the magnitude of this peer group effect
is really based off of how
often that they're interacting and
also the intensity and the quality of the experience.
In a sense, you could take frequency times intensity
equals impact.
What we want to have happen is we want to have
the best learning experience for the students.
That's the reason why peer learning groups,
those that are intentional,
they have a particular set of
protocols and activities which they engage in.
Well, they can end up having a bigger impact on
this intensity experience and
they end up having a higher impact upon them.
Once again, why is it that we care so much?
Well, it's because we want to
have the most positive group of students
surrounding individual students to
help them because they're going to become like them.
Now, for me and my college experience,
I didn't get a chance to
participate in intentional study groups.
I had some really nice people who I studied
with that were in my classes. How did I pick them?
Well, because they were within one or two chairs of me in
the classroom and I was able to talk with them,
and I had a good experience from that.
But some students, they don't get
that chance or the students who they're
surrounded by aren't really all that committed to
school or lots of things that come in.
That's the reason why we want to find ways to
have a really positive influence upon the students.
Now, what are some of the common
challenges that they're dealing with?
I could spend half an hour just talking
about Tinto's six themes of attrition.
I won't do that. I'll just simply encourage you.
If you don't know anything about Dr. Tinto,
just simply do a Google search
and look for Tinto's themes of attrition,
and you'll be able to find all kinds of
articles and publications about it.
Let me just simply circle peer learning groups have
a big impact on
these four major causes
of students dropping out of college.
We can't do much about these bottom two down here,
but it's a pretty significant group when you think about,
they can deal with four of those.
Other ones are stereotype threat.
Dr. Claude Steele pointed out that if you take a group of
students and if you tell them that,
"Well, you ought to go
and take advantage of this program,
or else you're going to drop out of
school," and it's a really good program.
Now, he didn't couch it quite like that,
but I'm just simply trying
to put my own little personal spin on it here.
We have to be careful whenever we talk
about academic support programs for students.
The more that we can embed the programs into
the course in which
all students end up participating, well,
then you don't have the issue
of stereotype threat because
students don't think about it that they're
high risk and we are
really worried about you dropping out.
If you don't know anything about Dr. Steele's work,
just simply do a Google search on stereotype threat.
Another issue is the stigma.
I ended up working and directing learning centers
at two community colleges
and one four-year college in my career.
I think learning centers and
drop-in tutoring programs are very powerful.
They're able to give a lot of assistance to students.
One of the challenges is that,
however, most of the time,
those things were voluntary.
You had to volunteer to go in to get the help,
and from a student point of view,
they appreciate that there's learning centers there.
They appreciate what the tutors do for them.
But they feel some stigma
because they're going in to pick up that help.
That's the reason why many of the programs that
identified with that six at the earlier slide, well,
they have mainstreamed their programs
so that it's pretty seamless.
Everyone is participating.
It's a normal behavior.
It's part of a workshop.
It's part of an enhancement,
extended learning,
lots of different ways to describe that.
Now, what are the challenges with
traditional study skills classes?
Well, I've taught those before,
and I'll have to recognize these were some challenges.
Students had a large,
really difficult time transferring from
a standalone class in which they
learn study skills and
then how to be able to make application.
Now the best practices of
these study skill classes now is that
they end up having students bring in
their textbooks and their homework from other classes,
and they spend a lot of time
doing integration work inside.
I'm not casting aspersion to
all the study skills instruction that's going on.
It just makes it harder.
If we can somehow be able to integrate it seamlessly,
it's going to be more effective.
Another problem is that
steady skill classes generally
don't have any academic credit,
and that causes difficulty.
Then without support, students
tend to revert back to their old habits.
That's true for us as well.
Think about our own selves,
about choices about exercise,
or what we eat,
or positive habits that we're trying to
develop or negative ones we're trying to get rid of.
The students are no different than us.
What's the problem in higher ed
and what is it that these programs are dealing with?
We don't want to talk about high-risk students.
That's not true.
What it is is that there's
a mismatch between where the preparation level is
for a lot of students and what
the expectations are inside of the classrooms.
That's not making a judgment about the students.
It's not making a judgment about faculty members about
being too hard and difficult or whatever.
Not even trying to get into any of that.
By talking about this mismatch,
what we want to do is that we want students to
raise their level of performance to meet, let's say,
if this is the faculty expectation level,
we want them to meet it or to exceed it then.
What are some common design features that you'll
find inside of most peer learning programs?
Once again, I could spend a half hour to an hour just
talking about these theoretical frameworks.
I just simply want to identify them for you here.
Constructivism, zone of
proximal development with Vygotsky,
Astin, student involvement,
academic social integration;
Tinto, situated cognition; Hattie,
Biggs, and Purdie,
collaborative learning; the Johnson & Johnson brothers.
All of those different theory bases
help to drive all of these programs.
I would encourage you to pick some of these to learn
more about if you're just
getting into peer-assisted learning.
Most of these programs,
they're all going to be run by
either near-peers or co-peers.
Near-peers means that they're
probably someone who's already
taken this difficult challenging course before,
got good grades, received training,
and they're back to help
the currently enrolled students to do well.
In co-peers, well,
those are students who are inside
that class for the very first time along with
you and they are running academic support programs.
Those are typical models for what we're doing in terms of
what students do we select
to help run these peer-assisted learning.
What kind of classes are being targeted?
Well, generally, they're historically difficult.
Long time ago we used to talk about
high-risk courses or high-risk students.
Well, you seldom find that
talked about in the professional literature anymore.
It's stigmatizing, it's disrespectful to the faculty,
disrespectful to the students.
That language is not helpful.
But there are classes that are difficult.
In my background, I came from
something called supplemental instruction.
The very first class that SI
was offered in at the University of Missouri,
Kansas City was an anatomy and physiology class
for students in med school.
These were all highly capable students.
For the most part, they were valedictorians coming
out of their high schools and now they're in med school.
But it was a challenging course because of
the vocabulary and the speed of delivery.
You go across the United States and if you talk with
most A&P instructors and look at the grades,
you wouldn't have seen that it's challenging.
We end up targeting
those courses and provide supplemental services.
What's a magic number?
Well, there's nothing magic about 30% D's,
F's, W's, and incompletes.
It's just that that tends to be a class that is
presenting itself to be
difficult and most students end up knowing that.
Also, this idea about being
a gatekeeper are prerequisite class.
Sometimes, and particularly now
at the time that I'm recording this video,
we're dealing with the flu
pandemic here in the United States.
Lots of college classes are now converting
over within a period of three days over to
online and academic support programs
are now moving also online.
Well, online courses can be challenging
and academic support can be provided online.
But that's a whole another series of videos.
It's this whole idea about front-loading services.
We need to get services into
students during their very first academic term.
In fact, research from Tinto and others
said that it's the first six weeks of
the very first academic term that students
most often make a decision
to drop out of the institution.
This is the reason why we want to have our best services.
We want to have additional services at that time.
What are some common guidelines that go
into these peer learning programs?
I won't read through
the detail that's on the screen here.
I'd recommend that you hit
the "Pause" button in order to be able
to drink in all of the content.
But it's a pretty complex set
of activities that are occurring.
That's the reason why it takes
a couple of days most often to
train these student leaders
of these peer learning groups.
They spend lots of time during those two days of
training doing mock sessions where they're practicing.
They end up watching a lecture,
they end up taking notes,
and then they end up either working with
the other facilitators in training or they get
a group of students to come in and they
end up creating these mock sessions so
they can practice implementing
all the different peer learning activities,
how to model study strategies
within a review of the content.
All of those kinds of things are pretty complex.
It's reason why training is
an essential issue for helping programs to be effective.
What is it that's happening inside of these sessions?
Well, it's a lot more than only
discussing the course content. That's important.
But also they start to think
about what it is that they're reading and
hearing and they're going to
discover that they're missing
things and knowing that
they're missing things helps them to
become more attentive and
they listen to other students as well
as the facilitator of these study groups.
Well, how can I be more
effective in tackling the material?
They learn how to be able to analyze,
question, seek verifications.
Also they understand the world is a little bit
different because of their own personal experiences.
It's a really rich environment that they're in.
It's about this interaction
that's occurring within the group.
They're exploring new topics and they're
making application of the material.
They're constructing their knowledge.
That's reason why
the theoretical underpinning for constructivism was
mentioned on that earlier slide when talking about
the different theory bases that underlie these programs.
It is that if they don't
construct the knowledge for themselves,
if they're just doing gorge and perch,
just trying to learn enough within
the last 48-24 hours in order to do well on an exam,
they're not going to remember any of that material.
The forgetting curve is something like 98%.
Well, we're trying to find ways that they
can internalize this information,
develop the skills needed,
and also to retain
the critical information that they're going to
need later in the course and in
future courses in the academic sequence.
Inside of these groups,
it's supposed to be highly interactive.
This is just simply
a very clean model of
what you hope happens inside of these sessions.
You've got a facilitator
and then you've got a group of students,
and at the beginning of the term,
we don't really want them to be in
high control of the facilitator.
But they tend to drive
the study review sessions
a little more because the students,
they don't know how to be able to do
a lot of these new kinds of study behaviors.
For them, this is all new.
At the beginning of the term,
you're going to tend to see a lot more control by
the facilitator or leading or influencing,
whatever word that you want to use.
But what you want to see is that
you want to see a change going on or
more influence and power and
control is taken on by the students.
Now, there's still going to be some influence going
on by the facilitator by the end of the academic term.
But what you really want to be able to
see is if you're an observer and
you walked into a peer review session
during the last two weeks of the academic term,
ideally, you wouldn't be
able to know who the facilitator was.
You'd see that the students
already are picking up on what are the things they
need to do to unpack
the last lecture and the assigned readings,
and how is it to prepare for the exam.
By the time we have gotten to
the end of the academic term over time.
Well, they're starting to develop
their own mastery of how to be able
to study in groups and
also how to be able to study by themselves.
For a lot of students,
whenever they come into a classroom,
and almost despite all the good efforts of instructors,
and I think about this for me.
I just retired after being
a history teacher for 40 years.
While everything seems terribly clear to
me and connected and all the rest,
well, sometimes this is the way
it looks like for students.
You got your lecture notes,
and then you got a textbook or online readings,
and then you've got other readings
they're responsible for.
As a result of being in the peer learning groups,
we now suddenly are able to
create an organized ecosystem.
Things make sense.
Connections are made among the material.
Students are making connections between what they
know and what they've just learned.
They're observing the behaviors of the other students.
This ecosystem here is critical to be developed.
Well, what does it cost in order
to develop these programs and implement them?
Well, that's the reason why we talk about this
partially as an investment as well as a cost.
Training is going to be critical,
faculty need to be strongly
supportive along with the administrators.
There needs to be some sort of
a supervisor or call it a coach to be
able to give feedback and additional training
to these facilitators throughout the academic term.
Because not only do the students need to learn
new skills inside of
the study groups on how to be more effective,
or they'll end up reverting back to their old behavior.
Well, that can also happen to the facilitators.
As one of the training directors
that I had a chance to work with,
Dr. Kim Wilcox pointed out.
One of the scariest things in the world is
during the very first study review session.
Whenever your students are inside of a room,
you've circled them up with
their chairs so they are looking at each other,
and you've closed the door to
the classroom in order to cut down the noise,
and it's just you,
and suddenly you get nervous.
Even though you're well-trained,
you've practiced, you've done the mock sessions,
it's easy for you
to go back to a question-and-answer format.
Because that's a default that students understand.
They see you as a teacher.
The idea about you facilitating and
turning the discussion back to them and
asking them to help bring out the answers out of
their assigned readings and
their lecture notes or
whatever quality of notes that they have,
well, that's really difficult.
That's the reason why you've got to have this
occurring throughout the academic term.
Well, we got to pay the facilitators
and you've got other resources.
The most expensive thing in any program is time.
Over the years, I've had
a chance to work with people who direct
peer learning programs at hundreds of colleges
in the United States and other countries.
What I've noticed is that well too often,
whenever a peer learning program is
introduced to the campus and it is
given to an existing learning assistance program,
whatever it's called, the learning center or whatever,
this thing becomes an add-on activity.
Somehow this just simply becomes
another element that goes
into the job duties for that person.
That is a good way to
condemn a program to not be effective.
You've got to have enough time for
the coaching and the training.
You've got to have enough time to do evaluation.
You have to have enough time for
the person who is in charge of
the program to be able to
engage in their own professional development.
They need to have the funds to go to
the national and international conferences
that most all of these programs have.
If you don't do those kinds of things,
if we don't have the time,
it's easy to throw money at an issue.
But if you don't have the time,
then it's better not to do it
because my research looked at
every single SI program in the United States
back in that be 1998 through 2000.
We found out one of the most critical factors
about programs that collapse and
stop working is that
the supervisor reports, they were overwhelmed.
It was too complex for them to
have added on to everything else that they're doing.
What is one of the sayings?
If you want to get something done,
find a busy person and assign it to them because they'll
figure out how to add it in to their work portfolio.
Well, that's a nice compliment to say about that person,
and I'm sure that they do outstanding work,
but you can also overwhelm someone.
So that's the reason why I just wanted to
point out this about implementation costs.
What's the benefits of the program?
Well, mostly they're focused on academic performance.
They want to see higher persistence rates,
and also there's a lot of benefits not
only for the participants in the programs,
but also for the student facilitators, or leaders,
or whatever it is that they call the person,
the student who's in charge of these groups.
They also get a great deal out of it as well,
and you'll see a slide coming up here in a moment.
That'll be a place where you could read about that.
But it is a way to
improve for the students who participate,
as well as students who run the groups.
Now what do faculty members get out of this experience?
Well, if they want it,
they can request anonymous feedback
through the study group leader,
not identify what students are asking or making comment.
But if the faculty member wants
the feedback, you can get that.
That doesn't tend to happen as
much here in the United States,
but that's a frequent thing that
peer review groups are used for in other countries.
I know that from personal experience in
South Africa that they saw that as
a vital way to get information to
faculty members who wouldn't gain it any other way then.
You get more academically prepared students,
faculty members like that.
They're going to ask more questions, better questions.
We know that they're managing their study time.
They're not just simply studying by themselves.
They're working with other students,
and faculty would like to know that then.
Also, student satisfaction ratings
for the class tends to go up.
Then finally, the last thing is that
this really helps out with large class sizes.
Lots of benefits for faculty members out of a program.
What's the institution get out of this?
Well, they like to know that
their historically underrepresented students
and difficult classes,
high demand programs are doing well.
They want to diversify the graduates.
One of the things that they do in
the United Kingdom is that when they evaluate colleges,
they look at the demographics of
the students who are admitted,
and it's expected that the graduation class will have
the same ethnic and cultural and economic diversity
as the students who came in.
If that's not happening,
then there's a problem and it actually can have
an impact on funding for your institution.
We haven't quite gotten to that
yet here in the United States,
but I think a lot of faculty and a lot of administrators
of goodwill are really concerned about that,
and that's part of the reason why some of
these kinds of programs have been created.
Obviously, there's more revenue if we're
going to have higher persistence rates.
We also have a way to provide
academic support for students in online courses.
As I said, right now,
this is March of 2020,
most colleges in America are all shifting within
a matter of days over to online instruction.
We want to maintain
high academic standards in larger classes.
Also, as a good summary for the whole thing,
what's the institution get?
Well, we end up helping to
achieve our mission and goals of the institution.
What's the future of peer-assisted learning programs?
Well, being mainstreamed and mandatory for all students.
It's part of the class.
It's part of the culture of the class.
Number 2 is you'll see
even beyond what's happened here this
term here in the United States
and I think with our colleagues around the world,
online peer-assisted learning programs are
here to stay and we're going to continue to
do these because we end up having
higher participation rates even after
this current flu pandemic passes.
People are going to say, by us doing things online,
everybody in the class can participate if it's
an out-of-class peer learning program.
Well, everyone can participate
because they can access it online.
They don't have to come back to
the campus in order to be able to participate.
I think it makes more sense.
I think that we're going to have
a need for new pedagogies of how you do it.
Here at this particular moment,
I monitor a number of the email,
chat rooms on learning
assistance and people are talking about using currently,
they're using a product called Zoom.
I'm going to end up using Zoom
coming up on this Sunday for a webinar.
Well, that's one product.
There's lots of other ones that are out there.
But the thing I want to get at is
we have to think about how can we be
more effective of how it is that we use
the online systems in order to be able
to have students have as an engaging,
productive kind of experience as they would have
if they were meeting in
the same classroom together for a study group.
Then finally, my last one down here
is one that I've just been learning about,
and that's called Students as Partners.
Students as Partners is a movement
from Canada, United Kingdom, Australia,
for the most part,
and is gradually starting
to trickle into some US institutions.
What it means is that the students actually are seen as
equal partners with the faculty member
in helping to redesign the course.
Pretty radical.
But also it seems to make
more sense that everyone needs to be a part of
co-creation of the knowledge and also the co-creation of
the way that the knowledge is gained inside the class.
I'm not going to say very much more here.
I'm just frankly learning a lot at this point.
I actually had no clue about
Students as Partners until I went to
a conference in Australia in October of 2019.
I just simply want to highlight that for you that maybe
this movement of SaP is
also going to have an influence
with peer learning because here you
have some really highly gifted people who are students,
who are helping to run these study review sessions.
Well, maybe these students
can take on additional responsibilities with
additional pay and such to help
with co creation and revision of the course.
So those are just simply some thoughts for
you on things that I think are going
on today already because a lot of
programs already are mandatory and are
mainstream and there are
already online PAL things that have
been going on for years even already.
I just simply wanted to
recognize some things that I'm learning.
So if you want to learn some more,
I highly recommend that you go to
this website here, z.umn.edu/peerbib.
If you end up going to there,
I end up maintaining an annotated bibliography on
every publication by these groups
here that's on the screen.
At this point, there's something
1,550-plus inside the database.
Not only does the bibliography
available that you can download,
but also I have a topical set of bibliographies,
including one that includes just publications about
online delivery of these seven programs
that are mentioned up here then.
That might be of high interest.
Also, there's bibliographies,
topical ones on what are the benefits for facilitators,
what are the personal growth
that participants are obtaining,
and all the rest then.
Once again, if you want more information,
these are a number of websites that I maintain.
I've already just shown you this peerbib one.
That was the one I just spoke about.
Then also, if you want to see anything I've ever written
about peer learning programs,
well, that one is the pubspeer.
Then if you end up going to peer learning, well,
that's a whole set of resources
that have been developed by
other people as well as by
my colleagues here at the University of Minnesota.
Then also finally, down at the bottom,
you end up seeing peer learning YouTube channel.
That's where I have detailed videos.
They go into a little more detail about each
one of those different peer learning programs.
Also another benefit from that one is interviews
with peer learning facilitators, the students.
Those are only about 4-5 minutes long,
but it's nice to hear from the student's point of
view what they're getting out of the experience then.
You see my contact information down here at
the very bottom of the slide with my phone number,
email, and also my web address.
I would be delighted to keep up the conversation.
I am learning so much with peer learning and now,
finally, as I'm in this next chapter of life,
I've got more time for me to be able
to learn more from other people,
and then my goal is to share what other people have
developed and have learned with other people as well.
So thanks for listening today.
I hope my words are useful in your work and
helping students to achieve their dreams.
Take care, everyone. Bye-bye.