Stuart Oliver

12. Empowering student learning with supplemental instruction

Stuart Oliver
From Developing Skill-based Curricula through the Disciplines: Case Studies of Good Practice in Geography. SEDA Paper 89, 1995. Reproduced with permission.

Introduction

Sorry, it's not about teaching. Supplemental Instruction is not about teaching: it's about learning. Supplemental Instruction is about empowering students to learn by using organised self-help tutorial schemes.

Supplemental Instruction starts from the assumption that students will want to learn but the current education system fails to nurture this desire. The emphasis in Supplemental Instruction is consequently on targeting "high risk" courses, those with high failure rates, rather than targeting the students whom the courses fail. The original behaviourist objectives of Supplemental Instruction were: to increase student marks on targeted courses, reduce the drop-out rates on those courses and, as a consequence, increase the proportion of students completing the degree courses. It has subsequently been used to reach a number of humanistic objectives: to promote critical thinking, co-operation, and leadership among students.

Supplemental Instruction programmes are organised by a "co-ordinator", who is a member of staff, but run by a "leader", who is a student. Supplemental Instruction leaders do not teach the subject, but facilitate collaborative learning among the students taking part. The programmes consequently have the potential to combine the challenging rigour of structured intellectual inquiry with the exploration possible in informal study groups, to give a safe, collective environment in which students can learn how to learn.

Context

Supplemental Instruction was developed by Deanna Martin at the University of Missouri - Kansas City, USA, in the mid-1970s. By the end of l991 it had already been adopted by over l80 academic institutions in the USA, and at Kingston University in the United Kingdom. By 1993 Supplemental Instruction had been running for over a year at 11 institutions in the UK, and many more are now examining its introduction. Courses using its approach are also now developing in Australasia, South Africa and elsewhere.

Supplemental Instruction was introduced on a trial basis into the Geography programme at Saint Mary's University College in February 1994 on the first-year Computing Skills course. The course is currently run six times a year. It takes 150 students of whom 70% are studying Geography and 30% are studying Environmental Science. As a compulsory service course aiming to train students in both manual and intellectual skills, Computing Skills proved difficult for a significant minority of students, and it was evident that students could benefit from Supplemental Instruction. This chapter is a preliminary report on the experience of using Supplemental Instruction on the course.

Resources

There is little, it can confidently be said, that is better calculated to send a shudder of horror to the ice-cold soul of every college administrator than to warn them that a new teaching initiative will cost. But cost Supplemental Instruction must.

Supplemental Instruction training has been adapted for use in the UK by the Education Development Unit of Kingston University, which runs it on a non-profit basis. Costs will inevitably date rapidly, but a full training of co-ordinators and leaders, which includes some continuing support, costs around £1,000 (in 1994). Using Supplemental Instruction will also involve either employing new staff, as co-ordinators, or redeploying existing staff. The one-semester course at Saint Mary 's costs about 40 hours of staff time for investigation and training, plus about 10 hours of monitoring and support time. Each additional course would cost about five hours each semester plus the initial training time.

The Supplemental Instruction leaders need about ten hours of training. Once trained, they must be rewarded. A few institutions have attempted to reward their Supplemental Instruction leaders by course credits or token gifts. Most pay a small amount, between £2.50 and £4.50 an hour.

At Saint Mary ' s, two students were employed as Supplemental Instruction leaders on the Computing Skills course. An average of 36 students attended the classes each week, and I decided on two leaders on the assumption that a maximum of one in three students would attend the Supplemental Instruction sessions and there should be no more than six students per leader. The actual attendance varied between four and 11 each week.

What staff do

An academic is someone who always has a contribution to make, and will try to make it whether other people want it or not. Staff co-ordinating Supplemental Instruction must, though, temper their enthusiasm to act with a sensitivity to nurturing the students' often fragile sense of autonomy. This may involve cultivating a beatific patience and, above all, the attitude that the process of exploration may well be more important than the act of discovery.

Supplemental Instruction co-ordinators are responsible for mediating between the students and the institution. In dealing with their institution, they must provide strategic planning for the introduction of Supplemental Instruction, monitor its implementation, and guide any changes necessary for the initiative to succeed. On behalf of the students they must book the necessary rooms, arrange the payment of the leaders, and counsel the leaders, giving advice on the role the leaders might be playing in sessions and helping them to help the students.

At Saint Mary's my objectives were to negotiate the successful introduction of Supplemental Instruction, identify the leaders and arrange their training, support the initiative through the semester (particularly by giving advice when the leaders asked for help) and assess and report on the results. As our world rewards selfish individualism, it's no surprise that I didn't always succeed in these objectives, but I did usually manage to learn from the process.

What students do

The most exciting aspect of Supplemental Instruction is to see how, with encouragement, students can take delight in learning. Supplemental Instruction provides what is potentially a useful antidote against an education system that tends to encourage passive learning over active exploration.

The Supplemental Instruction leaders are required to act with all the responsibility of paid employees. They must be prepared to attend the initial training, and to attend Supplemental Instruction sessions regularly. This is not a commitment which many students can make - or will want to. At Saint Mary's, 20 second-year geographers and environmental scientists expressed an interest in the Supplemental Instruction training. Of the 11 who had received above-average marks in the previous year's course and were invited to attend training, only two were able to attend. One subsequently left because of illness, and the other because of a lack of satisfaction. Fortunately, a number of first-year students had also been invited to attend: the two chosen, who had already sat Computing Skills in the first semester, proved to be excellent leaders.

Supplemental Instruction differs from other peer-support schemes because it is run by a trained leader. Under the guidance of the leader, students develop learning and studying skills at the same time as they come to terms with the content of the course. The leader acts to empower a collective learning that is usually not possible when students are being taught by a lecturer. The questions asked of the leader may vary from organisational queries related to the course, such as the timetabling of classes, to learning strategies such as the organisation of work and making sense of the instructions in the course booklets.

A good idea of how this can help is given in James Meikle's article on Supplemental Instruction (Meikle, 1993), which quoted a former leader as explaining that "People tend to come with people they already spend time with in college, so they are with friends and less inhibited than they would be with a lecturer." But the key to an effective use of Supplemental Instruction is that it adds to teaching, rather than making it redundant. As Meikle was told by one lecturer: "I don't see this as replacing the lecture or lecturers. It is supporting them."

Experience at Saint Mary's shows that Supplemental Instruction faces difficulties because it challenges the assumptions of the teacher-taught dichotomy. At least one colleague was openly suspicious of the value of the scheme. So were some students. I strongly recommended the sessions in my classes, but also needed to assure the students that attendance was not compulsory and that the register of attendants was only for statistical purposes. And the concept of self-directed work was difficult for some students. One leader told me that many students "sat back" when he arrived. "It's hard to do SI and not teach," he said.

Gains and losses

Perhaps you may have been lulled by comforting murmurings of "empowerment" to overlook the vulgar but necessary question: does Supplemental Instruction work? The answer to this question depends on the criteria used for assessment and for whom the benefits and costs are being assessed: The institution? The staff? Or the students?

A number of gains from Supplemental Instruction have been identified by its supporters. For the institution, it may allow a greater retention of students, provide a cost-effective way of supporting a large increase in students, help break down barriers between year groups, and help create a better learning community. For the staff, it may provide support for an increased workload, cut down some "minor' requests from students, better prepare students for course work by giving training in group work and Study Skills, and help develop independent learners. For the students, it may help improve Study Skills and performance, give confidential support from peers, demonstrate the benefits of collaborative working, and improve understanding of the work required on the targeted courses.

Nevertheless, there are a number of costs arising from Supplemental Instruction. For the institution, it may have associated costs in time and money (some of which might be hidden). For the staff, it may bring unexpected workloads, be used by the institution for providing cheap labour rather than redressing resource problems, and require a difficult change in teaching culture - from identifying "problem" students to identifying "problem" courses. For the students, it may require a difficult change in learning culture - from passive learning to active learning - and it may increase the already high workload, benefit neither the most able nor the least able, and lead to exploitation of the leaders.

For many institutions, the most important objective in starting Supplemental Instruction will be the effective investment of increasingly scarce resources. The issue of effectiveness is not entirely clear, because it is clouded by the difficulty of allocating causation accurately in the research that has so far been carried out.

Work in the United States has shown results that seem to support the use of Supplemental Instruction. On average, about one-third of students on a course will use Supplemental Instruction if it is available. For the student it has been significantly correlated with a number of benefits: higher course grades, higher final degree results and higher rates of completing degrees. These advantages seem to benefit not only white students but also those from ethnic minorities - though no detailed research has yet been carried out on other disadvantaged groups. The supposed benefits are clouded by the issue of motivation. Students who attend Supplemental Instruction are, on average, already more motivated to succeed in the course. Analysis of control groups has suggested that higher motivation does indeed explain part of the difference, but not all of it.

At Saint Mary's the students who attended Supplemental Instruction got higher marks, but they had also attended classes more frequently. Their average mark in the exam was 73% (compared with 63% for other students), and their average attendance was 86% (compared with 76% for others). This quantitative analysis shows the patterns of correlation, but to explain causation more detailed research will have to be carried out.

Conditions for transferability

We make our own courses, but we do not make them just as we please; we do not make them under circumstances chosen by ourselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from our institutions. The question of how Supplemental Instruction can be transferred to other institutions consequently depends not just on the effectiveness of the technique, but on the receptivity of those institutions to an innovation which may challenge accepted practice, and the reforming spirit of the staff and students to an innovation which will challenge their teaching and learning practices.

The institution's management must be able to reach a consensus that Supplemental Instruction is desirable because it is effective and efficient in reaching its objectives. The technique was not designed as an alternative to teaching, though some managers may be tempted to use it as such. The ethics of this temptation are complicated: for many institutions, unable to plan effectively because of continuous changes in government policies, the adoption of innovations such as those in this book can be little more than a coping strategy on the way to mass higher education. It must consequently remain the duty of staff to ensure that techniques such as Supplemental Instruction are used to enhance the targeted courses, rather than to cover up a decline in quality. This duty is not just to the institution and students but also to the staff member concerned because, with emphasis increasingly being placed on the bureaucratic rating of performance, few will wish to be associated with an innovation that could fail.

With the investment of adequate resources (staff time and student time), Supplemental Instruction seems to be capable of fulfilling its objectives - not to improve teaching, but to improve learning. Its implementation demands co-operation between institution, staff and students: failure of one party to consent risks failure of the innovation to succeed.

Correspondence: Stuart Oliver, Saint Mary's University College, Waldegrave Road, Twickenham, London TWl 4SX.

References

Martin, DC and Arendale DR (1992) Supplemental Instruction Improving Student Success in High-risk Courses. University of South Carolina, Division of Continuing Education.

Martin, DC, Blanc RA, and De Buhr L (1983) "Breaking the Attrition Cycle: the Effect of Supplemental Instruction on Undergraduate Performance and Attrition",  Journal of Higher Education 54, 80-89.

Meikle, J (1993) "Learning to Help Others", The Guardian, Education Supplement, 16 February 1993, 2.

Wallace, J (1992) "Students Helping Students to Learn", The New Academic, 1 (2) 8-9.

Further reading

Further information on Supplemental Instruction can be obtained from Jenni Wallace at Kingston University Education Development Unit, 21 Eden Street, Kingston upon Thames, London, KTl lBL. See also Rust, C and Wallace, J (1994), "Helping Students to Learn from Each Other: Supplemental Instruction," SEDA paper No. 86.