Interteaching within a human physiology course: a comparison of first- and second-year students' learning skills and perceptions

Abstract

This article describes student perceptions and outcomes in relation to the use of a novel interteaching approach. The study sample (n = 260) was taken from a large human physiology class, which included both first- and second-year students. However, unlike the first-year students, the second-year students had significant prior knowledge, having completed a previous physiology course. Active learning, where students were required to engage with course material in a self-directed manner before tutorials and to identify areas of difficulty and discuss these within tutorial sessions, was a central component of the study. The second-year students adapted quickly to the novel approach, as indicated by stable levels of perceived difficulty and understanding. In contrast, the first-year students demonstrated a decrease in perceived difficulty and an increase in perceived individual understanding throughout the study. These results notwithstanding, there was a consistent low level of interest for both years but no significant difference between the first- and second-year individual and group learning skills by the end of the study, as measured by their performance in the tutorials. Overall, the results were encouraging, with both years achieving a reasonably high learning skill level (average: ∼70%) within the interteaching environment. The improvement of active learning shown by the first-year students may have compensated, to some extent, for the prior learning advantage of the second-year students, since both groups achieved similar marks in the written components of final exams for both interteaching modules.

A Systematic Review and Quantitative Analysis of Interteaching

“…Only 55.5% provided information on student majors (academic discipline to which undergraduate students formally commit). The most frequently reported majors were in the areas of social science (24.1%; e.g., psychology or social work; Arntzen & Hoium, 2010 ; Felderman, 2014 , 2016 ; Rehfeldt et al, 2010 ), education (13.1%; e.g., Cannella-Malone et al, 2009 ; Mason, 2012 ; Rieken et al, 2018 ), and health (10.9%; e.g., nursing; Byrne & Guy, 2016 ; Goto & Schneider, 2010 ; Rosales et al, 2018 ; Soldner et al, 2015 ). Graduate-level studies were only conducted with participants majoring in areas of social science (5.1%) and education (10.9%; see Supplementary Table 3).…”

“…The majority of studies (71.5%) were conducted in courses covering social science topics (e.g., psychology of learning, social welfare; Arntzen & Hoium, 2010 ; Gayman et al, 2018 ; Truelove et al, 2013 ), followed by a small percentage of courses covering natural science topics (4.4%, e.g., anatomy and human physiology; Byrne & Guy, 2016 ; Mercer, 2014 ) and engineering (2.9%, e.g., biomedical engineering; Cezeaux & Keyser, 2018 ). Thus far, interteaching-related research at the graduate level has been conducted primarily in social science courses (see Supplementary Fig.…”

“…All identified studies were conducted in higher-education settings, and most took place at North American undergraduate-level social science classes that involved at least some face-to-face instruction. Although this pattern seems somewhat expected considering the origins of interteaching (e.g., behavior analysis and psychology) and its recent inception (less than 20 years), promising recent changes include implementation in more diverse areas of knowledge (e.g., natural sciences and engineering; Byrne & Guy, 2016 ; Cezeaux & Keyser, 2018 ) and evaluation of interteaching in asynchronous (i.e., Gayman et al, 2018 ; Rieken et al, 2018 ) or synchronous (i.e., Soldner et al, 2017 ) online settings.…”