Permalink : http://hdl.handle.net/2115/65044

JaLCDOI : 10.14943/J.HighEdu.24.39

Recently, the number of universities in Japan that have introduced a system in which students give learning support to other students of the same university as one of the ways to improve their education is increasing. The purpose of this article is to examine the following questions: what did those students learn by participating in learning support activities, and what kind of effects does a learning support system have on those students? The case chosen is the Active Learning Advisor (ALA) system of Kanazawa University, which was started in 2015. ALAs provide support to enhance and deepen the learning of undergraduate students in their assigned course in and/or outside class time. The support they give includes facilitating group discussions, giving advice on students’ presentations, research, and papers, and answering questions about the contents of the course. ALA Activity Reports, which ALAs are required to write after they have provided learning support, are used for quantitative and qualitative analysis. From the analysis, two points became clear. First, most of the ALAs thought that the ALA activity was interesting and also meaningful to themselves. Second, through supporting the learning of other students, ALAs learned more deeply about the contents of courses and, at the same time, acquired teaching and generic skills. These are significant because they will likely to affect ALAs’ motivation and learning outcomes of their own studies at the university, and the skills they have acquired will be useful not only while they are university students, but also in their futures.