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The Hechinger Report
The science of talking in class
Studies suggest how to guide students for productive discussions and group work
By Jill Barshay
February 3, 2020
One of the hallmarks of so-called “progressive” schools is freedom for
students to talk to each other in class. Students aren’t required to
sit quietly all day, obediently listening to a teacher lecture or
silently completing an assignment on their own. The Swiss psychologist
Jean Piaget, whose theories of child development inspire many teachers
today, thought peer interaction was important both for a child’s social
development and for learning itself. Piaget believed that children were
passive recipients of knowledge when instructed by adults. But he
noticed that when a child was asking questions and arguing with a
fellow student, the child became an active, engaged learner. It’s that
active engagement that leads to learning, Piaget theorized.
Yet when teachers open the classroom to group work and children’s
chatter, peer learning can seem like a waste of time. Students often
veer off-task, talking about Fortnite or Lizzo. Noise levels rise.
Conflicts erupt. Are they really learning? Whether it’s productive to
allot precious classroom minutes for children to talk with each other
remains a debate with practical consequences.
A team of U.K. researchers collected all the studies they could find on
peer interaction, in which children are either discussing or
collaborating on an assignment together in small groups of two, three
or four students. They found 71 studies, covering more than 7,000
children and teens. Most of the studies took place in the United States
and the United Kingdom. The results: Piaget was partly right …
and wrong. Students tend to learn better by interacting with each other
rather than wrestling with an assignment or a new topic on their own.
But interacting with an adult one-to-one is even better than
peer-to-peer interaction.
“That’s great, but how many times can a teacher work one on one with a
child?” said Harriet Tenenbaum, an expert in learning at the University
of Surrey and one of the study’s authors. “Group work should not be
seen as a waste of time. There’s something about conversation that
helps people learn. Doing problems on your own isn’t as beneficial.”
Tenenbaum and her co-authors found that peer interaction helped
children at all ages, from the youngest four-year-olds to the oldest
18-year-olds in the studies. Groups of three or four students were as
productive as pairs of two, though most of the studies had children
working in pairs. For studies that noted gender, boys and girls equally
benefited from working in pairs or groups regardless if they worked
together or apart. The study, “How effective is peer interaction in
facilitating learning? A meta-analysis,” was published online December
2019 in the Journal of Educational Psychology.
Students didn’t always learn more from interacting with each other than
working alone in the 71 underlying studies. The ones that produced the
strongest learning gains for peer interaction were those where adults
gave children clear instructions for what do during their
conversations. Explicit instructions to “arrive at a consensus” or
“make sure you understand your partner’s perspective” helped children
learn more. Simply telling students to “work together” or
“discuss” often didn’t generate learning improvements for
students in the studies. That’s because students often repeat what they
already believe in an unstructured conversation. The instructions force
children to debate and negotiate, during which they can clear up
misunderstandings and deepen their knowledge.
“Instructions are really important,” said Tenenbaum. In other words,
the trendy direction to “turn and talk to your neighbor” isn’t
sufficient.
Unfortunately, this meta-analysis didn’t shed light on so many
questions I have about peer dynamics and learning. Do kids still learn
well from peers when one student is dominating the conversation or when
a partner is slacking off and forcing you to do all the work? These
studies didn’t document behaviors during a conversation. Can you learn
as much from a bright peer as a struggling learner? Too few of
the studies noted students’ prior achievement levels to compare that
with how much they learned during the exercise.
I was especially disappointed that there wasn’t much insight into when
a peer-to-peer discussion is most productive during a lesson. These
underlying studies didn’t take place in real classrooms but in
controlled laboratory conditions. Generally students came to a room and
were tested to see what they already knew about a topic. Then some
students were randomly assigned to work in pairs or group on that same
topic. Students assigned to comparison control groups did different
things depending on the study: toiling on their own, working with
an adult or even doing nothing. Then everyone was tested at the end of
the exercise to see how much they learned. Learning gains were measured
by comparing before and after tests.
Tenenbaum’s advice isn’t to get rid of traditional instruction but to
use peer discussions to reinforce a lecture. She recommends that
teachers continue to teach a lesson to the whole class, as usual, and
then break the students up and have them work with a peer for five to
10 minutes to reinforce the concept. “I wouldn’t say to five-year-olds,
‘work with peers all day long,'” she said. Keeping the peer-to-peer
sessions short might also help keep children and adolescents on topic.
But the science doesn’t yet prove this advice is sound. “The next step
is to test this in real classrooms,” said Tenenbaum, suggesting that a
teacher could give a half-hour lesson and then researchers could split
the kids up into working in groups or alone and see who does better.
“But it’s really hard for researchers to get into classrooms,” said
Tenenbaum. “For schools, it’s disruptive.” Much like talking in class.
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