Effects of Camera Placement on Undergraduates’ Peer Teaching Reflection

We investigated whether camera placement affects peer teachers’ focus of attention during reflection. Preservice music teachers ( N = 14) reflected on peer teaching videos that had been recorded simultaneously from a head-mounted camera and a tripod-mounted camera at the back of the classroom. Participants completed the teaching reflection cycle twice, providing their observation comments in response to open-ended prompts. Responses were coded, with a single sentence as the unit of analysis, and a three-way repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed a significant difference in comment frequencies according to comment type (student-focused or teacher-focused) but not according to camera placement or trial. Our results corroborate previous research indicating that undergraduate peer teachers focus more on themselves than on their peers, and suggest that placing the camera in a position that shows the students, rather than the teacher, does not seem to affect this tendency. We discuss the implications for peer teaching experiences in teacher education courses.

The peer teachers’ perception of intrinsic motivation and rewards

Peer-assisted learning (PAL) is an educational method commonly applied in academic teaching. It is characterized by the interplay between peer teachers and learners who are at a similar academic level. Although it has been shown that peer teachers benefit from participating in PAL, little is known about their perception of motivation and rewards. Here we designed a questionnaire and measured the perception of intrinsic motivation and rewards of peer teachers from three different PAL programs. Overall, peer teachers were highly intrinsically motivated. The reward category Supporting Others was appreciated the most, followed by the reward categories Self-Improvement, Feedback, and Financial. The perception of rewards reflected the features of the three PAL programs. For example, the item “learning the teaching matter themselves” was most valued by peer teachers who were enrolled in a PAL program that deployed their peer teachers primarily to convey knowledge. In contrast, “actively shaping the teaching situation” was appreciated most by peer teachers of the PAL program that enables their peer teachers to conceive their teaching sessions independently. These findings go toward recommendations of the implementation and further development of PAL programs. If PAL programs clearly define their features and aims, they could specifically attract (and select) peer teachers and meet their needs as well as expectations, providing opportunities to gain knowledge and teaching experience. Ultimately, these PAL programs could better support the learners.

Teachers’ Reflections on Teaching Mathematics in English: A Consideration for Developing ESP Course

This study aims at investigating the difficulties faced by mathematics teachers in delivering learning materials in English, the strategies carried out by the teachers to overcome their problems, and its implication for ESP design. Conducted in a private school in Surakarta, which uses the Cambridge curriculum, this study involved five mathematics teachers. The data were collected by interview to elicit detailed information. Then, the data were analyzed using the interactive analysis method. Based on the study, the teachers faced several difficulties, namely vocabulary mastery, pronunciation, grammar mastery, and speaking fluency. The teachers’ strategies to cope with the difficulties were improving English skills by learning from reference books and other sources, printed or online, and collaborating with peer teachers. They also used an online platform to assist their learning as well as prepare the learning media. It implied that ESP design for mathematics teachers needed to cover four aspects: vocabulary mastery, pronunciation, grammar mastery, and speaking fluency. Several platforms could be utilized to design the ESP course, including the platforms that supported the linguistic aspects and mathematical knowledge.

Peer teaching as bioinformatics training strategy: incentives, challenges, and benefits.

As biomedical research becomes more data-intensive, bioinformatics is becoming essential to understanding biological processes, systems, and diseases. In this paper we describe the use of a series of peer teaching workshops as a strategy to respond to the bioinformatics training needs at a research-intensive institution. In addition to the data collected from the workshops, we also used personal experiences of researchers who participated as peer teachers to understand the incentives, challenges, and benefits of peer teaching. Developing communication skills such as confidence in teaching, explaining complex concepts, and better understanding of the topic emerged as primary benefits that the teachers obtained from this experience. Lack of time for teaching and the struggles of classroom management were identified as two major challenges. We suggest that peer teaching can be beneficial not only to train researchers in bioinformatics, but also as a professional development opportunity for graduate students and postdoctoral trainees.

Changes to students’ motivation to learn science

Studies that investigated the relations between the environment and students’ motivation to engage with science have typically looked at the state of students’ motivation at a given time and its relations with the environment. This study took a different perspective; it looked at the changes to students’ motivation to engage with science that occurred over a school year and investigated what drove these changes. According to goal orientation theory, students typically shift their personal goal orientations towards their perceptions of the goal emphases of their environment. For example, if students perceive their science teachers as highly emphasizing mastery orientation, they are likely to become more mastery oriented towards science with time. However, different environmental influences, such as parents, peer, teachers, and general school culture, push and pull the students in different directions. Using survey data gathered from Israeli adolescents that came from low SES backgrounds, we demonstrated that any shift in students’ mastery orientation towards science was not related to their perceptions of the environmental emphases, but rather to the differences they perceived between the environment and themselves. In addition, we identified which environmental influences were stronger predictors of shifts in students’ mastery orientation towards science. These results help to clarify the influence of the environment on students’ motivation to engage with science, can help understand why interventions may sometimes lead to counter-intuitive results, and can provide the basis for a model that may be useful for predicting how students’ motivation for science may change over a school year.

Student Perception of Case-based Teaching by Near-Peers and Faculty during the Internal Medicine Clerkship: A Noninferiority Study

Introduction: Third-year medical students traditionally receive their didactic or small group teaching sessions from clinical faculty during clerkship rotations. Near-peer teaching is increasingly recognized as an acceptable method for teaching, however most near-peer teaching takes place during the pre-clinical curriculum. We sought to determine if fourth year medical students were noninferior to faculty in facilitating small group discussions during clerkship rotations. Methods: Seventy-five third-year medical students participated in a small group session focused on rheumatologic diseases during their internal medicine clerkship rotation. Students were taught by fourth-year medical students who self-selected to participate as near-peer teachers at 1 clinical site (near-peers, N = 36) and by clinical faculty at another site (N = 39). At the end of the session, third-year medical students completed a survey evaluating teacher performance and effectiveness. Results: There was no significant difference between the 2 groups on each of the 17 survey items assessing teacher performance, the total teaching performance score, and the teaching effectiveness rating (all P-values >.05). A mean between-group difference of 2% in favor of the near-peers indicated noninferiority of the near-peer teachers compared with faculty teachers on the total teaching performance score. An absolute difference of 14% in favor of the near-peers indicated noninferiority of the near-peer teachers compared with faculty teachers on the teaching effectiveness score. Near-peer teachers reported several benefits, including improving their own medical knowledge and skills as a future educator. Discussion: Our data supports the noninferiority of the perceived performance and effectiveness of near-peer teachers compared to faculty teachers in the clerkship setting. Adding near-peer teachers to the clerkship setting is feasible and can be beneficial to all stakeholders.