Per Sigurd Hundeland & Petter Pettersen
7. Why Introduce SI at the Business School?
At the Business School at Nord University, the students in mathematics are served by SGT. It is a high-risk course with a huge failure rate and withdrawal rate. Are there any arguments for also giving SI? Since SI is a supplemental service, it must be given in addition to the regular lectures and SGT sessions that are the main service we give to the students. It is clear that SI has some strengths in the standardised education of SI leaders and access to an enormous teaching and research community.
Tab. 2: Some differences between SI and SGT according to statements from students from the two courses in our study
SI SGT
• The formal training of the SI leader se-cured high quality of the supervision given by the SI leader.
• Due to the lack of formal training of the TAs the supervising from the TAs is ex-perienced as being of variable quality.
• A huge part of the students claims that SI sessions gives the most learning out-come compared to other ways to organ-ise teaching.
• Many students think that other ways of organising teaching give better learning outcome than by participation in SGT.
• It is difficult to detect the development of fruitful learning strategies even if that is emphasised to be important in the re-quirements of the SI method.
• The informants reported that they learned a lot of learning strategies, most of them valuable even if learning strat-egies were not included in the formal content of the SGT.
• In this study, we show that the SI leader gave ordinary tutoring to the students in a classroom. This may be argued to be in opposition to the described methods of SI.
• The small group rooms facilitate the process of collaborative learning be-tween the students without supervision by the TA.
• In our study of SI, the students main-ly work in a group of 10–20 students in one room. Our study shows that this is not ideal for stimulating cooperating between students. In the documentation on the SI method, there are not any re-quirements on what rooms to be used.
• SGT in areas with a lot of small group rooms available facilitates cooperation between the students.
Note. These are findings from our study and are not necessarily equal to the descriptions of the methods in the documentation.
SI can also be viewed as a leadership development programme, as explained in Helde and Suzen (Helde & Suzen, 2019). A lot of students at the business school head for jobs as leaders; thus, the use of SI will be spot on for the students. To have a cer-tificate as an SI leader, and having worked as SI leaders during their study, will be valuable on student CVs. In addition, SI can be used as a retraining tool for staff due to rapid technological changes. Then all students with first-hand experiences from SI can benefit from this when they are job seekers.
These perspectives on SI are enough to introduce SI as a tool to the students in mathematics at the business school.
8. Conclusion
The literature review of SI and SGT shows that there are a lot of similarities, but also differences, between the two methods. Both emphasise to start learning processes be-tween students, so-called peer learning. In SI, the SI leaders supervise the students during the SI sessions, and in SGT, the TAs supervise the students. The SI leaders and TAs are always older students who have taken the course in question with excellent grades. When analysing informant thoughts about their experiences with the method they participate in, we found confirmation of many of the typical characteristics of the methods but also lack of typical features. The training of SI leaders ensures that no students were in doubt of the SI leaders’ qualifications, but for the TAs in SGT, some students were critical of the TAs’ qualifications. Even if learning strategies are very important in SI, it was easier to find that SGT has developed participants’ learning strategies. Our informants show a lack of development of fruitful study techniques in the SI group.
This study shows that the main strengths of SI over SGT are the formal education of the SI leaders and the benefit of a worldwide education and research community.
But our study also shows that even if SI focuses on learning strategies, our informants do not develop such strategies through participation in SI sessions. This is a weakness of SI. Even if SI is used, it is not guaranteed that all claimed benefits will be achieved.
Perhaps our comparative study and the detection of weaknesses of the two methods show the necessity of fine-tuning a teaching method to the course and student group in question.
In the end, we want to claim that both SI and SGT can increase the quality of the service given by learning from each other. The SGT method will benefit a lot from giving formal training to the TAs as a requirement for all hired TAs. We also claim that there should be more research in the SI community by using small group rooms.
The systematic use of small group rooms may increase cooperation between students.
Systematic research on using small group rooms can be a fruitful finetuning of the SI method.
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