A modified peer instruction protocol: peer versus teacher's instruction

Abstract: Peer Instruction (PI) was introduced by Mazur to help students learn physics concepts during lectures. Besides physics, PI has also been adopted in other STEM fields. In this approach, students answer a related question individually after a concept has been presented. Before they revote on the same question individually, they are asked to convince others their answer is correct during peer discussion. The percentage of correct answer typically increased after peer discussion. However, Smith et al. highlighted that the improvement may be due to copying, not because students actually learned how to reason correctly. To exclude copying, Smith et al. modified Mazur's PI protocol by adding a second question Q2 after the students revote on the first question Q1. Q2 is 'isomorphic' to Q1, meaning that it requires the application of the same concept but the 'cover story' is different. The answer to Q1 is not revealed until after the individual vote on Q2. Here, we simplify Smith et al.'s PI protocol by removing the revote on Q1. Moreover, our Q1 and Q2 are similar, i.e. the same but some information given is different. Our PI protocol is thus the same as Mazur's, except the pre and post discussion questions are not exactly the same. We compare the effectiveness of PI, in our protocol, to teacher's instruction (TI) for a pair of similar questions, involving Lenz's law, using Hake's normalized gain and a statistical test.