Student achievement and attitudes during subjectverb agreement units taught in college English classes when Flanders Interaction Analysis is used as a training variable

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 51-53)The purpose of this investigation was to determine if training in Flanders Interaction Analysis (FIA) would affect student achievement and student attitudes in college English classes where subject/verb agreement was the topic of study. Furthermore, the study was designed to examine if students taught by instructors trained in FIA vis-a-vis an expert trainer would have significantly different achievement and attitudes from those students taught by instructors trained in FIA by means of a self-paced modality. Three teaching assistants participated in the study, each having two sections of students. One teaching assistant was randomly selected to receive FIA training vis-a-vis an expert trainer, one teaching assistant was randomly selected to receive FIA training by means of a self-paced module, and one teaching assistant was randomly selected to receive no FIA training. Thus two experimental groups and an active control group, totalling 123 students, were involved in the research. Five instruments were used to collect data: the teaching assistants' recording of FIA, a 26-item, four-option objective test over FIA, an attitude inventory administered to the teaching assistants over the FIA training program, a 30-item, four-option objective test over the subject/verb agreement unit of study, and an attitude inventory over the subject/verb agreement unit of study. Simple arithmetical procedures were employed to analyze the data collected from the teaching assistants trained in FIA. The teaching assistant trained in FIA by the self-paced module had a lower coefficient of interobserver reliability, had a lower score on the FIA achievement test, and had a lower mean on the attitude inventory than did the teaching assistant trained in FIA vis-a-vis an expert trainer. The findings suggest that a greater knowledge about FIA content can be gained by vis-a-vis training rather than by a self-paced modality. An analysis of covariance was used to analyze the student data on achievement. ACT verbal scores and pretest scores were used as covariates with the posttest scores..