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Astronomy Education Review / Volume 7 / Issue 1 / RESEARCH AND APPLICATIONS

2008, AER, 7 (1), 37, doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.3847/AER2008004

What Are They Talking About? Lessons Learned from a Study of Peer Instruction

Published 7 July 2008

Mark C. James, Federica Barbieri, and Paula Garcia

Northern Arizona University

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Electronic classroom response systems (CRSs) have been in use in large college lectures for over three decades. Such systems are designed to provide instructors and students with immediate statistical analyses of student electronic responses to multiple-choice questions posed to the class by the instructor. The technique known as peer instruction uses a CRS to tabulate student responses after students have had an opportunity to discuss ideas with seat partners. In this study, we investigate recorded peer CRS conversations collected in two introductory astronomy courses over two semesters. Findings suggest that when instructors adopt a high-stakes grading incentive that assigns little credit for incorrect CRS responses rather than providing forums for the spontaneous exploration of nascent ideas, conversations tend to become dominated by a single partner as students attempt to earn maximum credit for a correct answer. We also present a comparison of two methods for studying conversation bias in peer instruction discourse that could be valuable to other researchers interested in studying peer discourse.

© 2008 Mark C. James. Copyright assigned to the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc.

KEYWORDS and PACS

Keywords

Assessment, College non-majors, Cooperative group activities, General (applies to all topics), Research into teaching∕learning, Teaching approaches

PACS

PUBLICATION DATA

ISSN

1539-1515 (online)

Publisher

$abstract.society.value is a Member of CrossRef Mark C. James. Copyright assigned to the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc.

ARTICLE DATA

History
Received 11 January 2008
Published online 07 July 2008
Digital Object Identifier
http://dx.doi.org/10.3847/AER2008004

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