Enhancing Peer Interaction and Learning in the Classroom Through Reciprocal Questioning

A guided reciprocal peer-questioning procedure was used by college students for learning expository material presented in classroom lectures. Students worked individually, using investigator-provided generic questions to guide them in generating their own task-specific questions. Following this self-questioning phase, they worked in small cooperative groups, taking turns posing their questions to each other and answering each other’s questions. This procedure was designed to promote the kind of verbal interaction that has been found to benefit learning in small groups, namely, giving elaborated explanations. Results indicated that students using this guided reciprocal peer-questioning procedure asked more critical thinking (vs. recall) questions, gave more explanations (vs. low-level elaboration responses), and demonstrated higher achievement than students using a discussion approach (Experiment 1) or those using an unguided reciprocal peer-questioning approach (Experiment 2). Guided reciprocal peer-questioning appears to promote peer interaction and learning in cooperative groups by controlling the quality of questioning, which in turn shapes peer responses.