Analysis of the Use of Questions in Small Group Tutorial Teaching in a Medical School: A Naturalistic Study

190 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1981.Video taped segments of small group teaching sessions, tutorials, which are used to teach the manipulation of the knowledge of pathophysiology of disease to second year medical students served as stimulus materials. They were observed by individuals from one of three categories: experienced tutors, naive tutors (physicians who were to become tutors but who had no experience with the method), and members of a control group. These subjects rated the segments as to the quality of the discussion and the videotaped tutors' abilities to facilitate their groups. The observers also suggested areas which should have been included in the discussions and specified occurrences in the groups which inhibited or facilitated the discussions. The experienced and naive tutors were somewhat better at these tasks than were the controls. The experienced tutors were better at identifying group process components that inhibited or facilitated the discussions. There were very few observer comments about non-verbal communication. Nearly all of the observer comments focused on the tutor and there were very few comments about the students' behavior. Naturalistic techniques were used to portray the communication patterns in the videotaped segments.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD