Deanna Martin

Deanna C. Martin is the developer of Supplemental Instruction (SI) and a leader in diffusing SI worldwide.^{[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]} SI is also called "Peer-Assisted Study Sessions," "PASS" or "SI-PASS."^[10][11] Many educational practitioners believe that SI's instruction model has been proven over numerous studies to reduce course and college attrition among students of all backgrounds.^[12][13][14] Other researchers disagree that existing studies have proven the efficacy of SI.^[8][15][16] Two of the claimed benefits of SI are contained in a study published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Experimental Education, which concluded that Supplemental Instruction "led to higher course grades and retention. The strongest relationships were often observed for underrepresented racial minority students and for students who attended at least five SI sessions."^[12] From her first grant in 1973, Martin has pursued educational equity in colleges and universities by helping to establish hundreds of programs to reduce attrition among all groups of students.^[1][9]

Supplemental Instruction[edit]

"In the half-century after World War II, higher education in the United States triumphed. Few industries grew as fast, gained as much prestige, or affected the lives of so many people."^[17] Higher education in the US and other countries expanded to include students who had been traditionally barred or constrained by ethnicity or social class. By the 1960's, state universities, particularly urban institutions like the University of Missouri - Kansas City, experienced a "dramatic change in the demographics of the student body and a sudden rise in student attrition."^[9] Martin put the onus of the failure on the academy rather than on the student: She stated her belief "that people fail because, and only because, the administrative structure of the university system is hostile to them."^[18] To eliminate or reduce failure, "SI focuses on historically difficult courses. Historically difficult courses often share the following characteristics: large amounts of weekly readings from both difficult textbooks and secondary library reference works, infrequent examinations that focus on higher cognitive levels of Bloom's taxonomy (Bloom, 1982), voluntary and unrecorded class attendance, and large classes in which each student has little opportunity for interaction with the professor or the other students."^[9] Thus, Martin's "approach focused not on 'at risk students,' but rather on 'at risk classes,' entry-level classes in health sciences, and later in general arts and sciences classes, where more than 30 per cent of the students were either withdrawing or failing."^[19]

In her Supplemental Instruction design, Martin uses a student (or peer) review session following each class lecture.^[1] An SI program provides peer support through an "SI leader," who is typically a student who succeeded in the particular academic course (e.g., Organic Chemistry, Biology 101, Logic) and who

"attend the course lectures where they take notes and complete assigned readings. The specialists also schedule and conduct three or four, fifty-minute SI sessions each week at times convenient to the majority of students in the course. Student attendance is voluntary. Individual attendance by participants ranges widely from one to twenty-five hours, and averages 6.5 hours per semester. The leader is presented as a 'student of the subject.'"^[1]

The SI leader is trained to not lecture but to lead discussions among students; in Martin's programs, SI leaders were also coached in study skills to share with the group; the SI leader thereby models study behavior to the group, but this in the context of a for-credit course rather than teaching these skills and habits in isolation.^[20]

"Supplemental Instruction developed from a deep level of dissatisfaction that grew out of our relatively unsuccessful attempts to teach study skills in isolation from course content to minority, first-generation, and other high-risk college students. SI grew out of the conviction that reasoning and study skills must be integrated with course content, not isolated from it. This 'single process' approach allows students to construct their own conceptual frameworks for understanding what to learn and how to learn it."^[21]

Educational Philosophy[edit]

Smith and MacGregor see Supplemental Instruction (PASS or SI-PASS) as a cooperative learning approach.^[19] It was also very practical: "Evaluation of the SI program was specifically designed with the intention of measuring the impact of the program on student performance and retention rates."^[1] A successful SI program, therefore, is one that measurably reduces attrition and improves grades in high-attrition courses. In the realm of educational theory, however, Karplus and Piaget influenced Martin's work, particularly work she and her team did in a Kansas City, Missouri high school, a feeder secondary school to her university, UMKC.^[22]

"Recent evidence^[23] suggests that 50 percent of entering college freshmen have not attained reasoning skills at the formal (abstract) operational level described by Piaget and Inhelder.^[24] Students who appear to operate at the concrete (nonabstract) level consistently have difficulty processing unfamiliar information when it is presented through the abstract media of lecture and text. Their questions about material are often detail-oriented and superficial. Rarely do they ask or answer questions that require inference, synthesis, or application. They can operate at more advanced levels once they have mastered a concept, but they require regular instruction that either anchors the concept directly in the student's previous experience or provides a concrete experience with data from which the concept may be drawn." ^[1]

The peer "SI leader" helps to anchor concepts in group discussions: "SI sessions are designed to promote a high degree of student interaction and mutual support."^[1] Martin and Arendale related the Supplemental Instruction peer-assisted study design to three educational theories: Jean Piaget and Constructivism, Edgar Date's Cone of Experience, and Vincent Tinto's Model of Student Retention.^[25] A core idea in SI is the insufficiency of the institution in providing educational equity and the need for alternative sources of learning, such as peer learning, to overcome the instructional shortcomings of today's colleges and universities. In particular, the post WWII higher-education system in the US did not adapt to student diversity: "Instead of limiting the student population to the affluent top 20 percent of high school graduates, the university now offered admission to a much more culturally and academically diverse population."^[9] While some blamed the student newcomers for the high attrition and low grades, Martin blamed the teaching for the failures.

"I believe people fail because lectures are parceled out in 50- and 75-minute segments. That as educators, we have confused 'broadcasting' or 'transmitting' information with teaching; that we reward memorization over understanding; and that we do little to attempt to capture and manage our most valuable resource on the campus: the students' study time. For under-prepared students, this step is essential. In fact, if you can capture and manage the students' study time, they not only pass, they excel. That is what our VSI program is all about."^[18]

Video Supplemental Instruction (VSI)[edit]

Adoption of consumer video products increased rapidly through the 1980s with the penetration of video cassette recorders and players in homes, schools and offices.^[26] In the 1980s, Martin and Robert A. Blanc applied video to the Supplemental Instruction sessions for students who hadn't previously benefited from SI, such as student athletes.^[27] They were the first to describe Video Supplemental Instruction:

"In VSI courses, instructors record their lectures on video tape and enroll students in a video section of the same course that they teach live on campus. For students in the VSI section, a trained facilitator uses the taped lectures to regulate the flow of information to the learner. The lectures are stopped and started as needed, allowing the facilitator to verify that students have comprehended one idea before moving on to the next. Students develop essential reading, learning, and study skills concurrently as they master the academic content material and earn top grades in core curriculum subjects commonly taken during the first year of college."^[28]

By allowing the SI leader to "regulate the flow," the VSI session breaks a "50- and 75-minute" lecture into as many short segments as needed by the group to master each concept. In VSI, the SI leader can "stop when necessary to permit students to clarify something the professor has said or simply to assure that the students are tracking the progress of the presentation" and added that "This technique derived from that used by John Madden, commentator on football for CBS network television."^[29] Madden ran plays in slow motion during US football games, stopped, slowed and rewound the videotape to explain a particular play to the viewers.

There are many different uses of VSI: Rural Missouri high schools used it for Advanced Placement courses with their teachers certified as VSI leaders;^[9] many SI medical-board reviews that covered basic sciences switched to VSI, and board-preparation programs can use videotaped lectures with a trained VSI leader;^[28] in South Africa, one study predicted that "students who will probably benefit most from this intervention, are students with a minimum level of pre-knowledge in Mathematics and who study in a consistent and responsible manner."^[30] And at engineering-school VSI sessions in Australia, "the recorded lectures were projected onto a screen in the classroom and students could indicate whenever they wanted the lecture paused."^[31] Video Supplemental Instruction has taken Supplemental Instruction to new students, new courses, and new places on the planet.

International Diffusion[edit]

Today, SI and VSI are used around the world. Well before that, however, SI needed to win adoption in its home country, the United States. According to Arendale, a "meeting in Washington, D.C. during 1978 was pivotal for eventual national and international dissemination of the SI model, and this led to UMKC submitting its data to the US Department of Education's National Diffusion Network ... UMKC submitted data from its own program and also several other colleges that had implemented pilot SI program as well. UMKC has collected SI research data from nearly 300 institutions in 7,500 classes with a combined enrollment of nearly a half million students."^[9] In 1981, Martin's Supplemental Instruction work was accepted by NDN as an "Exemplary Program" in education. As reported in the Kansas City Star newspaper, Dr. Martin's SI "became the first of the nation's 250 such programs to receive national validation by the U.S. Department of Education, according to Gary E. Widmar, UMKC's vice chancellor for student affairs. As a result, it will be distributing summaries of its program to colleges across the country, Mr. Widmar said."^[32] After the Department of Education deemed Supplemental Instruction as "suitable for replication," SI and Deanna Martin gained national attention.^[33] And SI gained widespread adoption by colleges and universities in the U.S. in the 1980s reaching 150 colleges and universities nationwide by 1990.^[34][35][36]

SI and VSI diffusion worldwide began in the early 1990's:

"The first European SI-PASS programme was established at Kingston University in England in 1991, two decades after it was introduced at the University of Missouri Kansas City in USA. Three years later, SI-PASS was adopted in Engineering and Science at Lund University, Sweden, as a way to raise the quality in education. Thereafter, SI-PASS has steadily grown in northern Europe. At present, there are some 75 Higher Education Institutes in twelve countries with SI-PASS schemes (Belgium, Cyprus, England, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Norway, Scotland, Sweden, Turkey and Wales). However, with supervisors trained recently from Denmark and Spain it is likely that an expansion will happen in the near future." ^[37]

In Europe and Asia, "Supplemental Instruction" is often referred to as "Peer Assisted Study Sessions" (PASS) or "SI-PASS" today: The name "Supplemental Instruction" had run into homologation issues in some nations and regions:

"SI had to be carefully positioned so as not to seem to compete with the professional tutors. Deanna Martin met with national education labor representatives to clarify the role of the SI program and how it enabled students to be more prepared for the tutorial services and class lectures. Even after these informal negotiations were resolved to the satisfaction to all parties, the name of the program was still potentially confusing."^[9]

Whereas, Martin and Robert Blanc helped to establish "SI" and "VSI" programs in South Africa,^[38] these programs were often renamed to "Peer Assisted Study Sessions" when they help to establish SI in Australia.^[39] During its first twenty years, Supplemental Instruction (PAL, PASS or SI-PASS) spread around the world. Some SI collaborators attribute some of SI's international success to the vision of the founders:

"Early on, SI’s founders decided that the SI model should be modified by its users rather than its creators. Martin and Blanc ... argue that SI should be 'fluid rather than rigid, dynamic rather than static.'"^[20]

Glen Jacobs followed Deanna Martin as Director of the Center for Academic Development, and in this capacity, he founded the International Center for Supplemental Instruction.^[40]

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