دانلود رایگان مقاله آموزش همتا با استفاده از روش Stepladder برای بهبود یادگیری

Abstract

Peer Instruction (PI) is an instructional strategy for engaging students during class through a structured questioning process that improves the learning of the concepts of fundamental sciences. Although all students are supposedly engaged in discussions with their peers during Peer Instruction, the learning gains generally remain at a medium level, suggesting a lack of participation of certain students who do not benefit from social interactions. The present study examined whether the Stepladder technique might optimize the Peer Instruction method and increase learning gains. With this technique, students enter a group sequentially, forcing every group member to participate in discussions. Eighty-four chemistry students were asked to answer easy and difficult multiple-choice questions before and after being randomly assigned to one of three instructional conditions during a chromatography lesson (Classic PI vs. Stepladder PI vs. Individual Instruction without any discussion with peers). As predicted, results showed that learning gains were greatest in the Stepladder PI group, and that this effect was mainly observed for difficult questions. Results also revealed higher perceived satisfaction when students had to discuss the questions with their peers than when they were not given this possibility. By extending the Stepladder technique to higher education, these findings offer a step forward in the Peer Instruction literature, showing how it can enhance learning gains.

5. Conclusion

The present research suggests that the Stepladder technique may be fruitfully extended to higher education, and may help further increase learning gains among students involved in a Peer Instruction session. While a large number of studies have compared the effectiveness of PI with traditional lectures (e.g., Hake, 1998; Mayer et al., 2009), the present study compared different ways of designing a PI session. As such, it may be considered as a paradigm shift from 'first-generation research', which has mainly compared traditional lecturing with active learning methods, to 'second-generation research' “using advances in educational psychology and cognitive science to inspire changes in course design” (Freeman et al., 2014, p. 8413). Finally, the present study may be considered as a first attempt to compare instructional methods where students have to interact with their peers, simultaneously or sequentially, with an individual instruction method without any social interaction. Although the present study is limited in scope, it offers a further step in the Peer Instruction literature, showing how learning gains can be enhanced when students are instructed to argue their points of view one by one instead of participating simultaneously in group or class discussions. As few studies have so far examined Peer Instruction in educational psychology, we hope that the present study will arouse interest among researchers in this field of research, helping them to design fruitful instructional methods to improve learning among higher education students, not only in the STEM disciplines, but also in many other disciplines in which multiple-choice questions are used.