April 13, 1998
Assertive partners can inhibit learning when students work in pairs
Although collaborative learning is a hot idea in education, a new study by University of Washington Assistant Professor of Education Mark Windschitl suggests the amount students learn may be related to whom they’re collaborating with.
Windschitl, who taught junior high school for 12 years before becoming an academic, had noticed that when students worked together in pairs, it wasn’t necessarily the student he thought of as the brightest who spoke up or took charge. In fact, one of the strongest factors in such situations was the student’s assertiveness. Windschitl looked for studies on this phenomenon and found few that dealt with assertiveness and even fewer that considered students working in pairs, as opposed to small groups. So Windschitl designed a study in which he tested how much students changed their misconceptions on a subject after an experience in which they learned about these misconceptions while working in pairs.
The participants in the study were 90 junior high school students who all had the same teachers for math, social studies and science. The students took a pre-test to determine their knowledge of the human cardiovascular system, and also a quiz in which they stated their beliefs about how good they were at science. Their three teachers were asked to rate the students on a simple four-point scale indicating their degree of assertiveness. Students then were paired, either with someone with a similar or dissimilar degree of assertiveness. The students spent two weeks learning about the human cardiovascular system, and on the last few days they worked in pairs on a computer simulation designed to correct their misconceptions about the system. Afterward, they took a post-test to see if their misconceptions had been corrected.
The results showed that students’ degree of assertiveness did not affect their conceptual change. However, their partner’s degree of assertiveness did. Overall, the higher the assertiveness of the partner, the less the conceptual change, and this was true even when the student’s pre-test score and beliefs about their ability were taken into account.
“The simulation the students worked on involved problem solving,” Windschitl explains. “It required dialogue; it required choices about what course of action to take. What we found was that when a student with low assertiveness was paired with the opposite, the highly assertive student took over and the low assertive student became a passive observer. And when you’re passive, you don’t learn very much.”
The results seem to run counter to the intuitive notion that low assertive students should be paired with more highly assertive ones in order to keep discussion going. Some have assumed that the more assertive student will help the less assertive one. But Windschitl says this rarely happens spontaneously.
“Unfortunately, the American system of education tends to foster competition, and students aren’t necessarily interested in how well their peers are doing,” he says. “If you want students working together to help each other, they have to be explicitly coached to do this.”
It’s also true that the smartest students aren’t always the most assertive. Although knowing the answers may make one confident, other factors may keep a student from speaking up.
Although he’s cautious about drawing conclusions based on one study, Windschitl says the work suggests that students with similar levels of assertiveness should be paired for dyad work. When two students with low assertiveness are paired, he says, they are forced to speak up more than they might otherwise do, and becoming involved leads to more learning.
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Windschitl can be reached at (206) 543-1847.
