Tutorial 305: Increase Student Engagement and Learning using a Free Tool for Peer InstructionIn-Person & Online
Decades of research on Peer Instruction have shown that it improves student engagement, retention, and learning. In Peer Instruction, as defined by Eric Mazur of Harvard, the instructor displays a difficult multiple choice question which students answer individually, then discuss with nearby peers, and then answer individually again. There is strong evidence for the benefits of Peer Instruction in both introductory and advanced computing courses. We have created a free tool, Peer+, for Peer Instruction. It has been tested over several semesters at multiple institutions (University of Michigan, Duke University, Virginia Tech, and Berea College) on over 1,000 students. Peer+ is available in the open-source free ebook platform Runestone Academy. Instructors can leverage any of the 90+ ebooks that exist on that platform or use an empty ebook for their Peer Instruction questions. We also added thousands of existing Peer Instruction questions from the https://www.peerinstruction4cs.org/ website to Runestone Academy ebooks for CS1 (Python, Java, and C++), CS2 in C++ and Java, and Discrete Math. We have explored new peer discussion modes including a synchronous text-chat where we assign students to groups to maximize the number of groups that have members with different answers and an after lecture asynchronous text-chat with an LLM chatbot. The LTI interface has recently been upgraded to 1.3.