Peer instruction is a tried and tested technique for teaching popularised by the Harvard physicist Eric Mazur. Join us to discuss the use of peer instruction in introductory computing via a paper by Leo Porter and his collaborators, [1] which won an award from the ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium Top Ten Papers of All Time. Here is the abstract:
Peer Instruction (PI) is a student-centric pedagogy in which students move from the role of passive listeners to active participants in the classroom. Over the past five years, there have been a number of research articles regarding the value of PI in computer science. The present work adds to this body of knowledge by examining outcomes from seven introductory programming instructors: three novices to PI and four with a range of PI experience. Through common measurements of student perceptions, we provide evidence that introductory computing instructors can successfully implement PI in their classrooms. We find encouraging minimum (74%) and average (92%) levels of success as measured through student valuation of PI for their learning. This work also documents and hypothesizes reasons for comparatively poor survey results in one course, highlighting the importance of the choice of grading policy (participation vs. correctness) for new PI adopters.
As usual, we’ll be meeting on zoom, see sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us for details and meeting URLs.
References
- Porter, Leo; Bouvier, Dennis; Cutts, Quintin; Grissom, Scott; Lee, Cynthia; McCartney, Robert; Zingaro, Daniel; Simon, Beth (2016). “A Multi-institutional Study of Peer Instruction in Introductory Computing”: SIGCSE ’16: Proceedings of the 47th ACM Technical Symposium on Computing Science Education 358–363. DOI:10.1145/2839509.2844642.