Reciprocal peer coaching and its use as a formative assessment strategy for first-year students

Co-operative learning is underused as a teaching and learning strategy in higher education and yet is ideal for courses that require students to learn skills that require manual dexterity, knowledge and clinical reasoning - key elements of professional and clinical competence. Reciprocal peer coaching (RPC) is a form of co-operative or peer-assisted learning that encourages individual students in small groups to coach each other in turn so that the outcome of the process is a more rounded understanding and a more skilful execution of the task in hand than if the student was learning in isolation. Used as a formative assessment strategy, RPC has the capacity to increase motivation in students due to the nature of the shared interdependent goal, and to provide immediate feedback to students on completion of the assessment. The purpose of this research was to interview a group of first-year students to elicit their perceptions of the RPC process. The data were analysed from a phenomenological perspective and revealed three themes: motivating learning, learning in groups and the context of learning. The findings were subsequently explored in relation to the concept of self-regulation of learning and the benefits which RPC as a formative assessment strategy has in promoting students' self-regulation.