Comparison of Four Reciprocal Peer Tutoring Settings for Acquiring Basic Life Support with Task Cards

Social constructivism has become a dominant theoretical framework in learning and instruction. Consequently, many educational researchers have developed and investigated instructional strategies from this perspective. Generally, those methods encourage discovery learning settings in which students work together in groups with no or minimal guidance. It has been stated that learners learn best in a nonor minimally guided setting where they have to discover and construct knowledge for themselves (Steffe & Gale, 1995; Papert, 1980). Advocates of this approach believe that instructional guidance might interfere with the natural learning processes and styles of learners and consequently negatively affect learning outcomes. Furthermore, learning is considered to be idiosyncratic and therefore a common instructional format or strategy might be ineffective (Steffe & Gale, 1995). However, an increasing amount of research evidence indicates that discovery learning settings with no or minimal guidance are inferior to guided methods of instruction in helping students learn and transfer (Aulls, 2002; Mayer, 2004; Moreno, 2004; Shulman & Keisler, 1966; Tuovinen & Sweller, 1999). In explaining this general finding, cognitive research has put forward the architecture of human cognition. Instructional procedures with no or minimal guidance are argued to overload the working memory, as explained in information processing theories (Chandler & Sweller, 1991; Mayer, 2001). This implies that with no or minimal instructional guidance, working memory is used to search for problem solutions and is consequently less available for learning activities through interaction with the long term memory (Kirschner et al., 2006). Therefore, it has been stated that learners with limited prior knowledge in any subject matter should be provided with direct instructional guidance on concepts and procedures and should not be left to discover these procedures by themselves (Mayer, 2004; Shulman & Keisler, 1966). Previously conducted controlled experiments indicate that when dealing with new information, learners should be told what to do and how to do it (Kirschner et al., 2006). Besides the research findings concerning instructional guidance in the cognitive domain, similar research findings can be found within the context of peer assisted learning, such as reciprocal peer tutoring. In physical education, reciprocal peer tutoring is a commonly implemented instructional strategy. In this format, students are paired and exchange roles of doer and helper (Mosston & Ashworth, 1994). While one student practices (doer), the other student observes (helper) and provides feedback or instruction. The feedback provided by the helper is based on instruction given by the teacher or instructional tools such as task cards. A substantial body of literature has documented the effectiveness of pairing students to teach and assess each other in both regular (Cohen, Kulik, & Kulik, 1982; Walberg, 1990) and special educational settings (Greenwood, Delquadri, & Hall, 1989; Greenwood, Maheady, & Carta, 1991). Moreover, it has been shown that academic gains can occur for both doers and helpers (Simmons, Fuchs, Fuchs, Mathes, & Simmons, 1997). According to Topping (2005), the cognitive exercise and benefit for the helper lies in the monitoring of the doer’s performance, detecting, diagnosing, correcting and managing misconceptions and errors. However, positive peer tutoring effects on learning outcomes are not accidental. Merely placing students in pairs is believed to be insufficient to ensure that learning will occur. Only when structure is implemented so that students understand how they should work together, cooperation and learning become maximised (Dyson, 2001; Johnson & Johnson, 1994). It has been argued that spontaneous tutoring behaviour tends to be primitive in unstructured peer tutoring settings (Person & Graesser, 2000). Moreover, Cohen (1994) reported that children in structured groups provided more solicited and unsolicited explanations than children in unstructured groups. It is believed that the frequencies of these types of interactions positively affect the learning that occurs. Despite these positive research findings, it should be acknowledged that a lot of research into peer tutoring within physical education is fragmentary, generally lacking conformity concerning design, procedures and the implementation of experimental conditions. This complicates the attempt to discriminate mediating variables responsible for better learning outcomes in different target groups. Furthermore, a lot of peer tutoring research in physical education seems to be comparative, comparing a control group or a baseline of regular instruction to one or more tutoring conditions (for review, see Ward & Lee, 2005). For example, a number of studies compared the effects of Mosston’s (1981) reciprocal teaching style with his command style of teaching. However, the present study focuses on the reciprocal peer tutoring setting itself. Four reciprocal peer tutoring settings are implemented to learn Basic Life Support (BLS) with task cards as instructional tools. Settings differed in the amount and quality of instructional guidance. Because task cards were the only source of information for learning BLS, it is worthwhile to take a closer look on how people learn from such instructional tools.