Effects of expert and non-expert facilitators on the small-group process and on student performance

Abstract

At the University of Michigan Medical School in 1990, the authors investigated the effects of faculty facilitators' levels of content expertise on the educational process and learning outcomes of small-group teaching sessions. The study was conducted in a microbiology course for second-year students in which four small-group sessions were used to replace 38 hours of lecture and laboratory time. The interactions between 11 expert and ten non-expert faculty facilitators and 156 students were observed and coded. The students' levels of knowledge and satisfaction were measured. The results indicate that, although significant differences in faculty-student interactions were not observed, the students in the 11 groups led by the content experts had higher levels of satisfaction and higher examination scores.

An Expert Instructor’s Use of Social Congruence, Cognitive Congruence, and Expertise in an Online Case-Based Instructional Design Course

“…In a CBL approach, this includes his or her understanding of the targeted problem space afforded by the specific case under discussion. Research has demonstrated a relationship between a facilitator's content expertise and student satisfaction (Davis, Nairn, Paine, Anderson, & Oh, 1992) and achievement (Davis et al, 1992;Schmidt, Van Der Arend, Moust, Kokx, and Boon, 1993), as well as instructor facilitation style (Gilkison, 2003;Groves, Régo, & O'Rourke, 2005). This is similar to what Bond, Smith, Baker, and Hattie (cited in Berliner, 2001) reported in their extensive comparison of expert and non-expert teachers: the greatest discriminator between these two groups was the expert teachers' abilities to create and provide deep representations of the subject matter.…”

Exploring the Relationships Between Tutor Background, Tutor Training, and Student Learning: A Problem-based Learning Meta-Analysis

“…For example, some researchers recommend that tutors be content experts or faculty with facilitation training (Barrows, 1996;Bochner et al, 2002;Gilkison, 2003;Schmidt & Moust, 1995;Schmidt, Van Der Arend, Moust, Kokx, & Boon, 1993;Schmidt et al, 1994). An early effort that characterizes the impacts of tutor expertise in relation to faculty direction of students (Albanese & Mitchell, 1993) found that expert tutors provide less engagement for student-directed discussion and learning (Davis, Nairn, Paine, Anderson, & Oh, 1992;Silver & Wilkerson, 1991) and were more likely to intervene in student-directed discussion (De Volder, 1982). Since the goal of PBL is to promote self-directed learning, these seem to provide a rationale against the use of expert tutors.…”

“…PBL tutors must understand how their role as a tutor changes during the course of a particular problem. In addition, tutors should have a great deal of familiarity with the problem and common approaches to solving it, either as a result of closely collaborating with the case designer or by co-authoring the instructional materials (Chan, 2008;Davis et al, 1992;Johansen, Martenson, & Bircher, 1992). Despite uniform calls for training, some studies have openly used inexperienced tutors with little training (Steinkuehler, Derry, Hmelo-Silver, & Delmarcelle, 2002), but those studies are the exception rather than the norm.…”

Effectiveness of Student Tutors in Problem-Based Learning of Undergraduate Medical Education

“…A number of studies have investigated the relationship between the tutor's background and learning outcomes, including the quality of the learning processes (Moust and Schmidt 1994;Maudsley 1999;Solomon and Crowe 2001;Matthes et al 2002;Kassab et al 2005a;Moore and Kain 2011), but their conclusions are inconsistent. Some studies show that there are advantages in having content-expert tutors in promoting positive learning outcomes (Davis et al 1992;Schmidt et al 1993) while others have found that no such difference exists (Regehr et al 1995;Dolmans et al 1996).…”