The Benefits of Peer Instruction

When working in groups, do discussions help students gain a better understanding of the material, or do students typically give in to the group consensus or the dominant voice? Early indications from a recent report in Science suggest that students working in groups do tend to improve their conceptual understanding, rather than merely agreeing with another student's answer.

In their study of students taking introductory genetics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, faculty used feedback from clickers to measure student performance on a series of questions. First a conceptual question is posed to the class, next the same question is asked but after peer discussion, and finally a third question, different in content, but requiring the application of the same principles required to solve the first question. As expected, students tended to answer more questions correct when working with the aid of a group, however a welcome surprise was that "students who answered both question 1 and question 1 (after discussion) incorrectly still appeared to learn from discussions with peers ... Of these students 44% answered question 2 correctly, significantly better than expected from random guessing." (Smith, M.K. et al., 2009, p. 123) These results help support the theory that students engaged in discussion gain a stronger conceptual understanding of the course content.

Read more from Inside Higher ED.

References

Lederman, Doug. (2009, January 5). Proving the Benefits of Peer Instruction. Inside Higher Ed.

Smith, M.K., Wood, W.B., Adams, W.K., Wieman, C., Knight, J.K., Guild, N., Su, T.T., (2009, January). Why Peer Discussion Improves Student Performance on In-Class Concept Questions. Science. 323(5910), 122-124. DOI: 10.1126/science.1165919

Related Links

Collaborative learning techniques by the Teaching Commons.

Using clickers for peer instruction by the Teaching Commons.