576 Chem. Educ. Res. Pract., 2013, 14, 576--588 This journal is c The Royal Society of Chemistry 2013

Cite this: Chem. Educ. Res. Pract.,2013,14, 576

Exploration of peer leader verbal behaviors as theyintervene with small groups in collegegeneral chemistry

Ushiri Kulatunga and Jennifer E. Lewis*

Current literature has emphasized the lack of research into verbal behaviors of teachers as a barrier to

understanding the effectiveness of instructional interventions. This study focuses on the verbal

behaviors of peer leaders, who serve as de facto teachers in a college chemistry teaching reform based

on cooperative learning. Video data obtained throughout a semester of General Chemistry I from two

different peer leaders, each interacting with a different group of students, was subjected to two rounds

of qualitative data analysis. First, Toulmin’s argumentation scheme was used to characterize the

arguments constructed by group members during peer leader intervention. Next, verbal behaviors

exhibited by the peer leaders during intervention were examined. Findings of this study showed that

peer leaders used an array of verbal behaviors to guide students to build chemistry knowledge, and

that a relationship existed between student argument components and peer leader verbal behaviors,

with data most frequently emerging in response to short questions from the peer leader, and warrants

in response to probing and clarifying questions. The findings from this study have implications for

professional development of teachers at all levels, specifically for demonstrating the interplay between

group intervention strategies and student discourse within cooperative learning groups.

Introduction

Cooperative learning is a student-centered instructional reformthat began in the 1960s and is currently prevalent at the collegelevel (Springer et al., 1999; Johnson et al., 1998, 2007). Cooperativelearning is achieved when students work together in groups toaccomplish shared learning goals (Johnson and Johnson, 2002).Cooperative learning has shown to be an effective student-centeredpedagogical approach that promotes positive student learningoutcomes (Webb, 1989; Slavin, 1996; Johnson and Johnson,2002; Kose et al., 2010; Kirik and Boz, 2012). Peer-Led TeamLearning (PLTL) (Gosser et al., 2010; Mitchell et al., 2012), ProcessOriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) (Lewis and Lewis,2005; Moog and Farrell, 2008), and Problem-Based Learning(PBL) (White, 2007) are some of the currently popular coopera-tive learning instructional approaches at college level (Eberleinet al., 2008).

In spite of these college instructional reform methods,research has demonstrated that one of the main barriers tothe implementation of such student-centered instructionalreforms is the inadequate training in pedagogy for collegescience and mathematics faculty (Wright and Sunal, 2004;

Walczyk et al., 2007; Al-Amoush et al., 2012). A study conductedby Walczyk et al. (2007) also found that college faculty who didreceive training were more likely to consult instructional innova-tion resources as support for teaching; therefore, professionaldevelopment regarding teaching is vital for the sustainableimplementation of cooperative learning at the college level.

For the successful implementation of cooperative learning,the teacher must be equipped with the necessary skills (Sharan,2010; Sharan and Tan, 2013). The teacher must employ effectivegroup monitoring (Johnson and Johnson, 1990) and intervention(Brodie, 2001; Hamm and Adams, 2002) strategies for coopera-tive learning to be effective. An evaluation (Cohen et al., 2004) ofteacher training programs, however, found that teachers learnedmore about routine administrative tasks (e.g. composing groups,assigning roles) than about group intervention strategies (e.g.when and how to intervene, use scaffolds, promote interaction,or otherwise guide the group process).

Group monitoring and intervention requires the teacher toengage in productive discourse, e.g., questioning and explora-tory talk, that helps students reason (Mercer et al., 2004; Webbet al., 2004; Webb, 2008; Ding et al., 2007). Studies have alsodemonstrated that students do not provide explanations forconclusions (Meloth and Deering, 1999; Chinn et al., 2000),elaborate on responses or ask high-level questions (King, 2002)without teacher guidance or explicit instructions to provide

Department of Chemistry, University of South Florida, 4202 E. Fowler Ave. CHE205,

Tampa, FL 33620, USA. E-mail: jennifer@usf.edu

Received 15th June 2013,Accepted 17th August 2013

DOI: 10.1039/c3rp00081h

www.rsc.org/cerp

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justifications. In a study conducted over a 20-year period on teacherinteractions by Galton et al. (1999), however, the percentage of timeteachers spent on directly providing students facts and proceduraldirections increased from 57% to over 80% of total teacher dis-course. This finding is disconcerting, since research suggests thatteacher discourse should comprise strategies such as scaffolding,probing, questioning, and challenging student ideas, rather thandirect teaching, in order to help students attain higher levelcognitive processing for successful learning (King, 2002). Recentresearch (Kennedy, 2004) also has demonstrated that instructionalapproaches have not changed despite many reform efforts. Teacher-centered beliefs are still dominant among teachers (Al-Amoushet al., 2012) and scaffolding practices are rare (Van de Pol et al.,2011). Therefore, examining the range of verbal behaviors exhibitedby teachers continues to be important. It is also important thatprofessional development programs focus on teacher discourse thatcan guide students to supply reasoning and explanations, such asthe development of skills for prompting, questioning, and otherwisescaffolding student group work.

In order to provide professional development programsfocused on teacher discourse, it is important to understandthe current state of the art of teacher discourse during coop-erative learning. Previous studies have investigated teacherdiscourse in cooperative learning environments at primary,middle, and high school levels. A study that examined teacherdiscourse in middle school cooperative learning found thatinstructional practice was mostly recitation and procedural(Webb et al., 2006). On the other hand, a study that exploredhigh school teacher discourse during cooperative learningfound that teachers used an array of mediated-learning beha-viors such as asking cognitive and metacognitive questions,challenging students’ perspectives, and scaffolding studentlearning (Gillies and Boyle, 2008). Research has also shownthat teachers who received training in specific communicationskills and questioning strategies used more challenging andscaffolding behaviors, resulting in improved reasoning andproblem-solving skills of primary school children (Gilliesand Khan, 2008, 2009). All of these studies investigated teacherdiscourse during cooperative learning with K-12 students, andthere is a lack of research on teacher discourse on this topic atthe college level. Literature has also suggested that there is ageneral lack of research on teacher discourse during coopera-tive learning (Hertz-Lazarowitz and Shachar, 1990; Gillies andBoyle, 2008; Webb, 2009). Our study begins to address thisliterature gap by investigating teacher discourse during groupintervention in a cooperative-learning-based teaching reform atthe college level.

Peer-led Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (peer-ledPOGIL) is a weekly implementation of cooperative learningwithin a college general chemistry course (Lewis and Lewis,2005, 2008). Peer-led POGIL is an adaptation of POGIL, which isa student-centered instructional reform with the objectives ofpromoting both content mastery and skill development, whereskills include both those that are more content-specific (such asinterpretation of graphical data) and those that might be termedbroader thinking skills (such as scientific argumentation).

POGIL curricular materials, known as ChemActivities, are basedon a guided inquiry model and are intended for use by studentsworking in small groups during class time, with the instructorfacilitating rather than providing direct instruction. These paperand pencil materials frequently employ a learning cycleapproach comprising three phases: exploration, concept inven-tion, and application (Karplus, 1977). In the exploration phasestudents explore a model, which can include data, figures and/orequations, and answer basic questions about the informationprovided in the model. In the concept invention phase, studentsare asked to make connections among different pieces ofinformation from the model. These connections are intendedto support the introduction of a particular chemical concept,with the formal name of the concept withheld until the end ofthis phase. Finally, in the application phase, students answerquestions that require the application of the introduced concept.A POGIL instructor, in this adaptation a peer leader but morecommonly a faculty member, is expected to guide students torecognize that they can answer the questions in the curricularmaterials using the information provided.

The peer leaders who facilitate these weekly POGIL sessionsin lieu of faculty are upper-level undergraduate students whohave done well in the general chemistry course or chemistrygraduate students. To avoid confusion for readers from othercontexts, it should be noted the term peer leader is commonlyused in the United States to denote an advanced studentfunctioning as an instructor for a group of less-advancedstudents rather than to denote student–student interactionsamong students at the same level. This study explores peerleader discourse by examining the verbal behaviors of peerleaders during group intervention. Collectively examining boththe teacher and the student discourse can help researchersunderstand better how instructors are interacting with studentsduring group intervention. For our setting, an argumentationframework was used to analyze the student discourse in con-junction with the verbal behaviors of the peer leader.

The role of argumentation in science discourse has beengaining recognition recently. Research has shown that studentargumentation has resulted in improved understanding ofscience concepts and better reasoning skills in elementaryschool children (Simon and Maloney, 2007), high school stu-dents (Jimenez-Aleixandre et al., 2000; Zohar and Nemet, 2002)and college students (Nussbaum et al., 2008). However, studieson argumentation have found that students have difficultyexplaining phenomena based on data (Sandoval and Millwood,2005; McNeill and Krajcik, 2007). Students also often do notprovide scientific explanations to support claims (Kuhn andReiser, 2005; McNeill and Krajcik, 2007). Teacher interventionstrategies can impact students’ scientific explanations (McNeilland Krajcik, 2008) and argumentation (Mork, 2012; Kaya,2013). Findings of a study conducted by Evagorou and Osborne(2013) on collaborative argumentation suggest that teachersshould be aware of the challenges students face when con-structing arguments and come up with the appropriate scaf-folding strategies to promote argumentation. It is important,therefore, to investigate whether instructors can prompt

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students to provide data and scientific reasoning as thestudents work in groups to construct chemistry knowledge.Combining the verbal behavior categories for teacher discoursewith an argumentation framework for student discourse allowsthe investigation of the relationship between instructor verbalbehaviors and student argumentation in our setting.

Recent studies have used argumentation as a tool to inves-tigate student discourse specifically in college chemistrycourses. Toulmin’s argumentation scheme (Toulmin, 1958)has been used to analyze physical chemistry students’ concep-tual progress and normative classroom practices in POGILclassrooms (Cole et al., 2011; Becker et al., 2013). Becker et al.focused on students’ development of particulate-level justifica-tions for claims in thermodynamics. Cole et al. analyzed moregeneral conceptual progress of students studying thermo-dynamics. Even though the findings of both of these studiesrevealed that the instructor’s role was important in scaffoldingstudent arguments during whole class discussions, theresearch focus was not on the interactive discourse betweenthe teacher and the students during small group intervention.One interesting finding from Cole et al.’s study, that the qualityof student discourse varied on different days, led to theseresearchers calling specifically for research into which ‘‘discourseinteraction patterns’’ between teacher and students would supportproductive argumentation. Our work answers this call.

In our study, peer leader discourse during group interven-tion was coded with verbal behavior categories established byGillies (2004, 2006) and Egan (2002), and student discourse wascoded with Toulmin’s argumentation scheme (1958). Weaddress the following specific research questions:

(1) What types of verbal behaviors do peer leaders exhibit asthey intervene with small student groups?

(2) What is the relationship, if any, between student argu-mentation and peer leader verbal behaviors?

(3) How do the peer leaders use verbal behaviors to helpstudents build chemistry knowledge?

MethodPeer-led Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL)setting

The peer-led POGIL sessions were held for a General ChemistryI course at a large public university in the southeastern UnitedStates. The students worked in small groups of 3–4 on targetedchemistry concepts presented via published guided inquirymaterials, ChemActivities (Moog and Farrell, 2008), in weekly(50 minute) peer-led POGIL sessions. The class sizes rangedfrom 20–24 students, comprising a total of 5–6 groups per class.The student groups were mixed ability based on prior achieve-ment in mathematics as represented by SAT or ACT scores.

The General Chemistry I students attended two regularchemistry lectures and one peer-led POGIL session each week.Each peer-led POGIL session began with a quiz and a briefintroduction by the peer leader. The students then worked onthe ChemActivities on chemistry concepts that they had not yetseen in lecture within small groups, typically for 20–35 minutes.

The students were asked to discuss each question and come to aconsensus answer within their group. Students were alsoassigned roles within groups to promote cooperative work. Theroles rotated weekly to spread the responsibility among all groupmembers. For any given class meeting, the Manager was respon-sible for monitoring group progress, which included makingsure all group members were working on the same question atthe same time as well as checking for understanding before thegroup moved to the next question. Formally, the Manager wasthe only group member allowed to initiate conversation with thepeer leader, although this rule was not always enforced. TheReflector was responsible for assessing group function andreflecting on strengths and areas for improvement that couldlead to better interactions among group members. The Recorderwas responsible for writing down the group consensus answersto every question in the ChemActivity and for making this workvisible and legible for monitoring by the peer leader during class.Although the peer leader reserved the option to call on any groupmember at any time, the Presenter was responsible for present-ing and discussing the group’s work as needed and was expectedto be able to explain what the Recorder had written. If a groupwas not functioning well, the peer leader could ask the groupmember in the appropriate role to address the problem beforeattempting a direct intervention.

Typically during a session the peer leader facilitated one ortwo whole-class discussions to address difficult concepts,although the majority of class time was spent in small groupdiscussion, with the peer leader moving around the room tomonitor and intervene with each small group as needed.

Curricular materials

ChemActivities are paper-and-pencil POGIL curricular materialsespecially designed for use in cooperative groups with the peerleader (instructor) functioning as a facilitator. As previouslymentioned, the activities are based on a learning cycle structurethat entails exploration, concept invention, and applicationphases with questions that guide students through an explora-tion of data, figures, or verbal descriptions to build chemicalconcepts. In this way, these materials are different from typicalworksheets in which students apply already-learned concepts tonew problems; rather, the materials are designed to introducestudents to new concepts. The ChemActivities are intended topromote analysis and interpretation, discussion, and studentarticulation of reasoning. The 15 ChemActivities in the semesterof this study introduced general chemistry concepts such asconservation of mass and balanced chemical equations, limitingreagents, specific heat and thermochemistry, coulombicpotential energy and its relationship to chemical bonding, theshell model of the atom, periodic trends, ionic bonds, Lewisstructures, molecular polarity, and intermolecular forces, as partof a standard first semester General Chemistry I course forscience majors.

Peer leader training

The instructors facilitating the weekly POGIL sessions werepeer leaders, undergraduate or graduate students who received

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mandatory weekly training and support from the course coordi-nator, a faculty member with both chemical and pedagogicaltraining. During the first hour of each training session, 8–16 peerleaders worked in groups of four on that week’s assignedChemActivity as if they were the general chemistry students. Thefaculty member who led the training sessions modeled the desiredbehavior of a peer leader in an instructional role in a guidedinquiry setting, which included monitoring the groups and inter-vening as necessary. In this way peer leaders experienced coopera-tive learning as modeled by the trainer, a learning method thatresearch has shown to be effective (Koutselini, 2009). Even thoughthe peer leaders were not provided a specific argumentationframework, during interventions the faculty member encouragedthe peer leaders to provide data and reasoning and to commu-nicate with the other members of the small group.

During the second hour of the weekly training sessions, peerleaders developed their plans for facilitation of that week’sChemActivity with their own students. In developing theseplans, they took into account not only their own experiencesdoing the activity as led by the faculty member, but also tried topredict what their students’ experiences were likely to be. Theirbasic approach was to pinpoint troublesome sections of theactivity and note them as especially important to monitor. Ingeneral, each peer leader’s facilitation plan for a particularactivity was individual, though all were aware of the generalstricture that the plan should support students in workingthrough the activity on their own, consonant with a guidedinquiry approach. As the term continued and the peer leadershad more experiences to draw upon, they also shared informa-tion about practical concerns, such as strategies for timemanagement in the classroom. By the middle of the term, thepeer leaders also mock-led small portions of an activity during atraining session while their fellow peer leaders and the facultymember observed and provided feedback. At no time were thepeer leaders trained specifically with the verbal behavior cate-gories or with the argumentation scheme used in this study.

For this study, discourse between a peer leader and a smallgroup of students in the context described above was analyzedin order to gain a better understanding of effective groupintervention strategies. As will be described below, verbalbehavior categories were used to investigate the role of thepeer leader’s discourse, and Toulmin’s argumentation schemewas used to analyze the student discourse.

Data source

A semester (Spring 2008) of video data on two small studentgroups in General Chemistry I was used. Maximum diversitysampling (Daniel, 2012) guided the selection of the peer leaders(instructors) and the groups. Peer leader 1 was a chemistrydoctoral student with three years of teaching experience as agraduate teaching assistant. Peer leader 2 was a senior under-graduate student with several years of chemistry coursework,including general chemistry, but this was her first experience ina teaching role. Both peer leaders are female. The diversity of thelarger group of peer leaders is such that revealing racial/ethnic

information would insufficiently mask identity, but the two peerleaders also did not have race/ethnicity in common.

The two student groups were selected to represent two differentgroup compositions with respect to sex and race/ethnicity toachieve maximum diversity, since literature (Webb, 1984) suggeststhat group composition in terms of sex and race/ethnicity canimpact group interactions. The student group in peer leader 1’sclass was composed of three females (two Asian, one Black) andone male (Black). The student group in peer leader 2’s classwas composed of four White male students. Both groups weremixed ability with respect to incoming mathematics preparation.The demographics of the two student groups are provided inTables 1 and 2. Student group composition remained constantthroughout the semester. All students and peer leaders in the studygave informed consent for video recording during class time.

A total of 20 videos, 10 from each class, were used for theanalysis and comprise the entire semester of group work. Allvideos were transcribed; transcripts were coded while watchingthe videos. During the coding of transcripts, peer-led episodeswere identified. A peer-led episode began when the peer leaderwas in close proximity to the student group and started interactingwith the group. The episode ended when the peer leader left thatgroup. Student discourse during these peer-led episodes wascoded with the analytic framework based on Toulmin’s argumen-tation scheme. If the student discourse during the peer-ledepisode contained at least a claim, data, and warrant (argumentcore), the episode was coded as a ‘‘peer-led argument’’. For thedata collected over the semester, a total of 23 peer-led episodeswere observed for peer leader 1, and 65% of these episodes werepeer-led arguments. For peer leader 2, a total of 34 peer-ledepisodes were observed, and 67% of these episodes were peer-led arguments. Each statement made by the peer leader in everyspeech turn during a peer-led argument was coded with a verbalbehavior category. Most of the time each speech turn containedonly one statement, however, in some instances a speech turncontained multiple statements.

Coding

The coding comprised two frameworks for this study, verbalbehavior categories for peer leader (instructor) discourse

Table 1 Group A demographics

Student Sex Race/ethnicity Year SATM Course grade

Scott M White Junior 550 AMike M White Senior 440 BJoe M White Sophomore 620 BRon M White Junior 420 C

Table 2 Group B demographics

Student Sex Race/ethnicity Year SATM Course grade

Janet F Asian Sophomore 580 CMichiko F Asian Freshman 540 BSam M Black Freshman 530 FMonifa F Black Sophomore 610 A

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analysis and Toulmin’s argumentation scheme for studentdiscourse analysis. Verbal behavior categories proposed byGillies (2006) and effective communication skills that haveshown to promote student group learning (Gillies, 2004,2006) were combined and adapted to this study, resulting ineight verbal behavior categories (Table 3) to fit our college-levelpeer-led POGIL setting. For example, the category ‘‘disciplines’’was not used, since it is more suitable for younger students.The category ‘‘teacher control’’ was modified to direct teachingto indicate instances where the peer leader (instructor) lecturedto the students instead of facilitating. The category ‘‘mediates’’was expanded to four different communication skills (probing &clarifying, acknowledging & validating, confronting discrepancies& clarifying options, offering suggestions) that have been shownto mediate learning (Gillies, 2004, 2006).

The eight verbal behaviors used to analyze instructor dis-course in our setting are shown in Table 3 along with examplesfrom the data set coded under each verbal behavior category.Direct teaching describes discourse where the peer leaderdirectly lectured or provided information to the students with-out guiding and facilitating. Short questions are questions thathave an expected answer and receive an unelaborated response.Short questions can be answered from prior knowledge orinformation provided in the models of the ChemActivities.Probing & clarifying behaviors elicit student responses thatrequire synthesis or analysis of information, or application ofpreviously learned concepts. Encouraging describes peer leaderverbal behaviors that praise the students for doing well on atask, expressing value or satisfaction. Maintaining is the codegiven to an expression whose function is to keep the classroomactivity moving forward. Acknowledging & validating refers tobehaviors the peer leader uses to let the students know that they

are on the correct path, providing reinforcement. Confrontingdiscrepancies & clarifying options captures situations when the peerleader notices and points out a discrepancy in the studentresponses, for example, students using information different fromthat given or employing more than one approach to a problem, orsuggests that there are different options. Offering suggestionsdescribes behaviors where the peer leader provides specific gui-dance to students to take a step toward solving a problem, withoutdirectly providing the answer.

One of the coders was the first author. The second coder wasa chemical education doctoral student who coded 20% of thetranscripts with peer-led episodes. Cohen’s kappa for the inter-rater reliability on verbal behavior categories was 0.8, which issubstantial agreement (Landis and Koch, 1977).

Toulmin’s argumentation scheme (Toulmin, 1958) was usedas the analytic framework for analyzing student arguments. InToulmin’s model of argumentation, an argument has specificcomponents. The claim is the conclusion at which one arrivesupon considering the data. The data consists of evidence,information, facts or procedures that lead to the claim. Thewarrant explains how the data or evidence leads to the claim.These three fundamental components (claim, data, warrant)comprise the core of the argument. Higher quality argumentsmay contain a backing (authority for the warrant) or a rebuttal(counter claim or a refutation of an argument component)(Erduran et al., 2004; Evagorou and Osborne, 2013). Althoughsome authors have referred to the potential difficulty of identi-fying the separate components of an argument in Toulmin’sargumentation scheme (Kaya, 2013), this study involvedtwo independent coders in identifying the student argumentcomponents. The first author was one of the coders. Thesecond was a chemistry education doctoral student from

Table 3 Peer leader verbal behavior categories

Category Example

Direct teaching Electrons in the outermost shell are referred to as valence electrons.Cl is very electronegative. Na isn’t. This is an ionic bond.

Short questions How many electrons?How many molecules do you have of carbon dioxide?What is the q for the nucleus of a carbon atom?

Encouraging Good! Fully confident.This will be a good learning experience.

Maintaining Are you done with your homework?Go put that on the board so everyone will know.

Probing & clarifying So why did you answer that for 10?What can you tell me about resonance?So how did you all know that alkanes were nonpolar?

Acknowledging & validating Okay, so it’s the smallest.That’s right.

Confronting discrepancies &clarifying options

But I just don’t see how those variables are going to work out. So just use. . .use that. . .and have it. . .So what you’re saying is that the largest effect on the melting point is the size.But I’ve just showed you that these sizes are the same. And they’re very different.

Offering suggestions So why don’t you try to calculate the specific heat of all three groups?Why don’t we look at the equation for E?

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another institution who had used Toulmin’s framework in herown research. Cohen’s kappa for the inter-rater reliability onthe argument components of the student discourse on 10% ofthe arguments was 0.64, which is substantial agreement(Landis and Koch, 1977).

Since previous research (Kuhn and Reiser, 2005; McNeilland Krajcik, 2007) has shown that students can have difficultysupporting their conclusions with data and explanations, wewere interested in examining whether the students provided thesesupports when generating responses for chemistry questions in thisstudy. Therefore, for examining the relationship between peer leaderverbal behaviors and student argumentation, verbal behaviors thatelicited data (evidence) and warrants (explanations) specifically wereexamined.

Results and discussion

Findings with respect to the first research question, ‘‘Whattypes of verbal behaviors do peer leaders exhibit as theyintervene with small student groups?’’ are presented here.The analysis revealed that all eight verbal behavior categorieswere present for both peer leaders (instructors). The distribu-tion of the verbal behavior categories with respect to each peerleader for the data from the whole semester is presented inTable 4. Peer leader 1 engaged in 15 peer-led arguments (acrossthe 10 peer-led sessions) in which a total of 153 coded statementsemerged. Peer leader 2 engaged in 23 peer-led arguments over thesame time period, in which a total of 250 coded statementsemerged.

As can be seen from Table 4, the distribution of the differentverbal behaviors was similar for both peer leaders. A chi-squaretest of independence revealed no statistically significantdifference in the distribution pattern of the verbal behaviorcategories for the two peer leaders (w2(7) = 4.78, p = 0.687). Shortquestions, probing and clarifying, and maintaining were themost commonly observed behaviors for both peer leaders. Itwas promising to find that peer leaders more often used shortquestions, probing and clarifying, and suggestions to guidestudents instead of direct instruction, in alignment with thepeer-led POGIL objectives. For both peer leaders, short ques-tions were exhibited about twice as often as probing andclarifying. All four types of specific communication skills,probing & clarifying, acknowledging & validating, confronting

discrepancies, and offering suggestions, that literature hasshown to mediate learning (Gillies, 2004) are exhibited by bothpeer leaders.

The second research question, ‘‘What is the relationship, ifany, between student argumentation and peer leader verbalbehaviors?’’ also led to meaningful findings. In order toaddress this research question, data and warrant componentsof the arguments were examined to see which peer leader verbalbehaviors elicited these argument components. The analysisof all the data components elicited for the total peer-ledarguments constructed during the semester revealed that forpeer leader 1, 64% and for peer leader 2, 61% of the datacomponents emerged from short questions. The analysis of allthe warrants revealed that for peer leader 1, 61% and for peerleader 2, 62% of the total warrants emerged from probing &clarifying verbal behaviors (Table 5).

These findings, that most of the data emerged from shortquestions and most of the warrants emerged from probing &clarifying, make sense in terms of the argumentation frame-work. Since data mostly comprises information (e.g. molecularweights, number of protons, electrons) that students use toarrive at a claim, short questions posed by the peer leaders tendto elicit the missing data. Since peer leader probing withprompts such as ‘‘why’’, ‘‘how’’, or ‘‘explain’’ and peer leaderrequests for clarification both tend to elicit explanations, whichare the warrants of arguments, probing & clarifying behaviorsmostly allow students to express missing warrants.

To move beyond a simple relationship between discreteprompt–response pairs, it was important to examine both thestudent and peer leader discourse throughout an interventionepisode to understand the cumulative process of peer-leader-assisted argumentation. An example of a peer-led argument ispresented in Fig. 1 to illustrate the relationship between thepeer leader verbal behaviors and argument components. Forcontext, this argument occurred in the POGIL session on theChemActivity ‘‘Atomic Size’’ while the students were workingon the question, ‘‘What trend in atomic radius is observed asone moves from left to right across a period?’’ While thisparticular interchange involves only one student directly inter-acting with the peer leader, the others, based on the video, arelistening. In this peer-led argument the peer leader interveneswith the small group by first determining the student’s beliefabout what the current task is, a maintaining verbal behavior,followed by a short question to start the process of determiningwhether the student is able to fully express an argument for theprevious task. The student replies to the short question with theanswer (claim), that the atomic radius decreases and provides

Table 4 Distribution of peer leader verbal behaviors

Verbal behavior category

Percentage of verbal statements

Peer leader 1 Peer leader 2(N = 153) (N = 250)

Short questions 38 34Probing & clarifying 20 14Maintaining 16 20Acknowledging & validating 10 13Offering suggestions 7 8Confronting discrepancies 4 2Direct teaching 3 7Encouraging 1 2

Table 5 Verbal behavior categories and argument components

Verbal behavior

Data (%) Warrants (%)

Peerleader 1

Peerleader 2

Peerleader 1

Peerleader 2

(N = 42) (N = 33) (N = 23) (N = 29)

Short questions 64 61 17 24Probing & clarifying 21 24 61 62

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the information, ‘‘because the core charge increases’’, (data)that was used to arrive at the answer. The peer leader continueswith probing and clarifying verbal behavior by asking, ‘‘Whydoes that happen?’’ and is rewarded with an explanation of thelink between the data and the claim, ‘‘there’s a greater chargepulling the electrons inward’’, which serves as the warrant.Finally, the peer leader acknowledges and validates the student’sanswer, as can be seen in the final statement in Fig. 1.

Although this episode demonstrates that the student wasable to supply an argument, a peer leader’s strategy of using aseries of verbal behaviors to see whether an argument can beproduced can also reveal problems with student reasoning. Thetwo vignettes that follow demonstrate peer leader use of avariety of verbal behaviors to guide students to build a correctargument.

For context, the first of these vignettes is from the Chem-Activity ‘‘The Ionic Bond’’, and Fig. 2 presents the studentdiscourse prior to peer leader intervention. The students aretrying to answer the question, ‘‘Which would be expected tohave stronger ionic bonds: NaCl or NaF? Explain yourreasoning’’.

As illustrated in Fig. 2, the students are providing someevidence (data) to support their claim that NaF has strongerionic bonding than NaCl. However, they have not explainedhow the evidence connects to the claim and are aware thattheir explanation is not ‘‘very scientific’’. In other words, thestudents have not provided a warrant to build a completeargument. When the peer leader intervenes, as shown inFig. 3, she begins with a short question (1), followed by probingand clarifying (3), as before, but this time the student she hasasked does not succeed in supplying a warrant (4).

When the student has difficulty supplying a warrant, thepeer leader offers the suggestion (5) to use the Coulomb’s lawequation (force a � [(q1 � q2)/d2]) provided at the beginning ofthe activity. Student 1 attempts to answer; however, the peerleader specifies that student 2 should answer (7), which iscoded as ‘‘maintaining’’ since she is requiring the studentwho was originally asked to address the question to do so.

Student 2 provides a piece of evidence (data) that the ‘‘distancefrom the nucleus to the valence electron is closer’’ (9–11) butdoes not fully connect this new data to the claim that NaF hasstronger ionic bonding. The peer leader acknowledges thisanswer (12) and proceeds to focus the students’ attention onthe mathematical relationship between two variables in theequation by probing the meaning of that relationship (14). Thestudents need to correctly interpret the relationship betweenthe variables, the Coulombic force (force) and the distancebetween the two centers of the ions (d), in order to provide thejustification that connects the evidence to the claim (15). Inother words, the peer leader’s probing & clarifying verbalbehavior is eliciting the warrant to complete the student argu-ment that was incomplete prior to the intervention. Once thewarrant has been expressed, the peer leader acknowledges andvalidates the response (16) and checks in with a short questionto see if the other students agree. In this episode, the peerleader guides the students with questions to help them inter-pret the Coulomb’s law equation and to use it as support fortheir evidence (the smaller size of the fluoride ion) in under-standing why NaF has stronger ionic bonding than NaCl. Thequestioning strategy used by the peer leader is in alignmentwith the peer-led POGIL objective of supporting students inrecognizing that they have access to all of the informationnecessary to address the questions in the ChemActivity.

Similar guidance from a peer leader can assist when stu-dents are missing both the warrant and the data. The secondvignette (Fig. 4) illustrates a peer leader guiding students toprovide the data to build an argument where initially thestudents only have a claim. For context, the students are work-ing on the ChemActivity ‘‘Lewis Structures’’, and addressing thequestion, ‘‘Predict the C–C bond length for a molecule with aC–C bond order of 1.5’’. A table comprising the molecularstructure, C–C bond order and C–C bond length for the organiccompounds ethane, ethane, ethyne, and benzene is provided inthe activity.

This peer-led episode begins in the same way, with the peerleader asking a short question to find out the group’s answer to

Fig. 1 Peer-led argument, from atomic size activity, with a single student in which peer leader verbal behavior codes are shown in bold italics and student argumentcomponent codes are shown in all capital letters.

Fig. 2 Student argument, from the ionic bond activity, in which student argument component codes are shown in all capital letters.

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a specific question (1). Student 2 provides the claim, the answerto the posed question (2), after which the peer leader probes thestudents to find out how they arrived at that answer (6). Student1 provides some evidence (data) by referring to taking anaverage (8). In order to move the students toward a fullerexplanation of the data, the peer leader asks a series of shortquestions (9, 11, 14, 16, 18), and provides some encouragement(14). This pattern of questioning demonstrates the way inwhich, when an expected scientific justification is not receivedfor a probing & clarifying verbal behavior, the peer leader canfocus on ensuring the students understand the data beforemoving to the rest of the argument. This combination ofprobing & clarifying followed by short questions was verycommon, particularly when students were not recognizing that

relevant data could be found earlier in an activity. For examplein Fig. 5, the peer leader again begins with probing andclarifying (1) and then switches to short questions (6) to elicitthe data after hearing an incorrect claim (4). The ensuingconfusion is resolved only when the peer leader’s continuedshort questions result in the students finding the relevant data(23) themselves.

After ensuring that the students can articulate the dataclearly, the peer leader can move back to probing and clarifyingto elicit the warrant, again using short questions as neededuntil the students are able to produce this final component ofthe core of an argument.

Argumentation, while an important goal in this setting, isnot the only goal; in addition to building arguments, students

Fig. 3 Peer-led argument, from the ionic bond activity, in which peer leader verbal behavior codes are shown in bold italics and student argument component codesare shown in all capital letters.

Fig. 4 Segment of peer-led argument, from Lewis structures activity, in which peer leader verbal behavior codes are shown in bold italics and student argumentcomponent codes are shown in capital letters.

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are expected to build chemistry knowledge. The findings for thethird research question shed light on how peer leaders useverbal behaviors to help students build chemistry knowledge,for example to fix an incorrect claim. The vignette in Fig. 6 is apeer-led episode in which the peer leader helps the students torecognize that they have made a mistake, and to correct it. Forcontext, the students are working on a series of questions fromthe ChemActivity ‘‘Coulombic Potential Energy’’ about deter-mining the potential energy of a hypothetical atom when thepeer leader intervenes.

As can be seen in Fig. 6, the peer leader begins the inter-vention by probing and clarifying, asking the students toexplain their answer (1–3). Student 4 provides a wrong claim,that the potential energy cannot be negative, as a response toher question (2). Based on student responses, the peer leaderthen offers a suggestion that students should look at theprovided Coulombic potential energy equation in order to solvethis problem (6) and guides them through each variable in theequation with a series of short questions (7–13). With hersuggestion, the peer leader is bringing in a piece of keyinformation (the Coulombic equation) that students had missed.The short questions continue as the peer leader draws attentionto the types of particles in a hypothetical atom (14–22). Sheacknowledges the students’ responses (23) and helps them buildthe full warrant by helping them put the different pieces ofinformation together, asking another short question (23) andreceiving the final piece of the puzzle (24–25), allowing her topoint out the discrepancy between the students’ new knowledgeand their original incorrect claim. Functionally, the peer leaderwas able to use a combination of verbal behaviors to engage thestudents in challenging their own previous response.

This peer-led episode illustrates how a peer leader can help agroup to correct an incorrect claim by using verbal behaviors touncover and correct a misunderstanding. This episode is focusedon resolving an incorrect understanding of the relationshipsamong variables in an equation, which may appear to be a basicconcept. The students, however, need to be able to correctlyinterpret the Coulombic potential energy equation to build relation-ships between multiple course concepts, such as ionization energy,atomic radius, and potential energy, a set of ideas that studentsfind very challenging. The student discourse following this peer-ledepisode revealed that students were able to construct argumentswith correct scientific justification and articulate relationshipsamong these difficult concepts. The students would not have beenable to achieve this if the peer leader had not initially helped themto resolve their misinterpretation of the equation and to under-stand that potential energy can be positive or negative.

In these intervention episodes the peer leader used someshort questions that elicited expected responses, which mayseem trivial if taken alone. Peer leader discourse, however, isbetter thought of as a collection of mediated-learning behaviors(probing & clarifying, offering suggestions, acknowledging &validating, and confronting discrepancies) accompanied byshort questions. Research has demonstrated that the combi-nation of short questions with mediating behaviors promotesinstructional scaffolding (Turner et al., 2002), creates a series ofreciprocal discourse that helps students focus on the activityand produce explanations (Gillies and Khan, 2008), and fuelsengagement and triggers more student questions (Zuckermanet al., 1998), all of which help students learn.

As seen in these episodes, the data analysis revealed somecommon scaffolding strategies the peer leaders used to guide

Fig. 5 Segment of peer-led argument, from atomic size activity, in which peer leader verbal behavior codes are shown in bold italics and student argumentcomponent codes are shown in capital letters.

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students to build chemistry knowledge via argumentation.With the use of these strategies, peer leader helped studentslocate relevant data, build justifications (warrants) for theirclaims, and correct incorrect claims in the process of buildingchemistry knowledge. These strategies are consistent withverbal behaviors that have been observed by researchers study-ing teacher discourse in cooperative learning environments(Gillies and Boyle, 2008; Gillies and Khan, 2008). Suggestingthe use of a relevant mathematical equation or guidingstudents through equations to help resolve incorrect under-standing of relationships among variables are other uniquestrategies observed in our college chemistry POGIL settingwhere use of equations is prominent. Ultimately, it is a collec-tive of verbal behaviors that seems to help students to buildchemistry concepts without the peer leader having to providedirect instruction.

Conclusions

Combining Toulmin’s argumentation scheme with theverbal behavior categories provided a fruitful framework forexamining peer leader (instructor) interventions with smallstudent groups. Focusing on verbal behaviors, understandingtheir relationship with student argumentation components,and noting their incorporation into guiding strategies providesa way to examine the functions of teacher discourse in groupinterventions. In this study, peer leaders employed a variety ofverbal behaviors, including behaviors that previous literature

has shown to mediate student learning in cooperative learningenvironments (Gillies and Khan, 2008, 2009). Most of theexisting literature investigating teacher discourse is at theK-12 level and focuses on classroom teachers (Gillies, 2006;Gillies and Boyle, 2008; Webb et al., 2006). The findings fromthis study add to this body of literature by demonstrating thatsimilar verbal behavior categories are useful for understandingthe ways in which college chemistry instructors can work withsmall groups.

The findings revealed a relationship between peer leaderverbal behaviors and student argumentation. A combination ofshort questions and probing & clarifying behaviors elicitedscientific evidence (data) and scientific justifications (warrants)from the students. Peer leaders scaffolded students with arange of verbal behaviors to help them build more challengingargument components, such as warrants. Prior research hasdemonstrated not only the difficulties students face whenhaving to support claims (Kuhn and Reiser, 2005; McNeilland Krajcik, 2007), but also that (McNeill and Krajcik, 2008)students may not receive much support from teachers forbuilding scientific reasoning. Since literature (Jimenez-Aleixandreet al., 2000; Zohar and Nemet, 2002; Nussbaum et al., 2008)has demonstrated that student argumentation leads tobetter understanding of science concepts and reasoning skills,effective teacher discourse resulting in student argumentationis crucial to students’ learning of science. The simple scaf-folding strategies used by the peer leaders in this study to helpstudents build scientific evidence and justifications therefore

Fig. 6 Peer-led argument segment, from Coulombic potential energy activity, in which peer leader verbal behavior codes are shown in bold italics and studentargument component codes are shown in all capital letter.

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have the potential to be of use in helping to improve sciencelearning.

Overall, this study revealed that peer leaders guide studentsto build chemistry knowledge through scaffolding strategiesinstead of via direct instruction, which is in alignment with thepeer-led POGIL objectives and consistent with effective groupintervention strategies that help students reason (Mercer et al.,2004; Webb et al., 2004; Webb et al., 2008; Ding et al., 2007).The scaffolding strategies that have emerged from this studyare resonant with prior work suggesting that teachers shouldengage in strategies such as probing, questioning studentperspectives, and challenging students to promote higher levelcognitive processes of students (King, 2002). We have notshown evidence of students being explicitly metacognitive asa result of interactions with the peer leader. It may be that suchexplicit metacognition requires a different distribution ofverbal behaviors than seen here, or a different set of curricularmaterials. A limitation of this study is that it is small andfocused, encompassing only two peer leaders and their inter-ventions with one small group each over the course of asemester; however, two very different peer leaders (based onexperience) and two very different groups (based on demogra-phy) were selected in an attempt to mitigate this limitation.Certainly in the future, the discourse of more student groupsand peer leaders could be collected and analyzed to get abroader understanding of this particular cooperative learningenvironment. It is also the case that this study used only videoand audio data with transcripts as a data source. Additionaldata sources, such as students’ written work, student inter-views, and real-time classroom observations, could shed morelight on the nature of interactive discourse and student learn-ing in the group environment. Additionally, even though weinvestigated the presence of argument elements and the differ-ent levels of arguments in the student discourse with Toulmin’sargumentation framework, we did not assess the quality of theoverall student discourse during group work. Mercer et al.’s(2004) criteria for exploratory talk would be an excellent analytictool for examining the quality of student discourse. The studentdiscourse in the small groups could be analyzed with Merceret al.’s criteria (e.g. sharing relevant information, inviting allmembers to contribute, challenges and alternatives madeexplicit and negotiated) to examine how students work coop-eratively to build chemistry knowledge. It would also be inter-esting to investigate the relationship between the peer leader’sscaffolding strategies and the quality of students’ exploratorytalk as they learn chemistry concepts. In this study, we havealso chosen to focus only on student discourse during inter-actions with peer leaders, leaving un-mediated group discoursefor another investigation.

The findings from this study have implications for professionaldevelopment, specifically for those engaged in implementation ofcooperative learning or other pedagogical approaches based onsmall groups. The two instructors in this study received the sameweekly training and exhibited similar verbal behavior patterns.Previous research also has shown that teachers who are trainedwith specific communication skills (Gillies and Khan, 2008, 2009)

and argumentation strategies (Kaya, 2013) tend to use morechallenging and scaffolding strategies to support student learning.Since effective group monitoring and intervention strategies arevital for the successful implementation of cooperative learning(Johnson and Johnson, 1990; Brodie, 2001; Hamm and Adams,2002), explicit tools for professional development are valuable. Theverbal behaviors that were shown to be effective for different tasksduring group work in this study can be presented as tools. Forexample, teachers can be provided with the type of verbal behaviorsthat can be used to maintain the student activity, to promoteargumentation, and to encourage students during group activity.Demonstrating that a range of verbal behaviors is necessary tosupport group work may help teachers to reflect on and to improvetheir own practice. We also believe that it will be important toshare with teachers examples of scaffolding strategies that displaydifferent degrees of guidance, and to ask explicitly how evenrelatively effective strategies could be improved. Such reflectionshould enable teachers to develop a fuller understanding of howthe level of guidance can either support or impede students’engagement in thinking for themselves as they move from novices(such as the peer leaders in this study) to experts.

The findings from this study can be used by teachers (K-12)and college instructors to understand what effective discoursecan look like when implementing cooperative learning.The combination of two analytic frameworks characterizingstudents and instructor discourse separately that is presentedin this study may also be helpful in future studies of grouplearning environments.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Janelle Arjoon and Nicole Becker fortheir contributions to this work. This material is based on worksupported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No.DUE-0618758. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recom-mendations expressed in this material are those of the authorsand do not necessarily reflect the views of the National ScienceFoundation.

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