Peer instruction: An evaluation of its theory, application, and contribution

Smith, Sheppard, Johnson & Johnson (2005, p. 88) stated traditional teaching methods as “the information passes from the notes of the professor to the notes of the students without passing through the mind of either one.” Students are generally instructed with traditional teaching methods in many different disciplines and courses. They have difficulties in problem solving, deriving the relationships, knowledge of representations, and conceptual learning in these methods (Crouch & Mazur, 2001; Savelsbergh, de Jong, & Ferguson-Hessler, 2011; Thompson, Christensen, & Wittmann, 2011). Many studies (Freeman, Eddy, McDonough, Smith, Okoroafor, Jordt, & Wenderoth, 2014; Hake, 1998; Preszler, Dawe, Shuster, & Shuster, 2007) revealed that traditional teaching methods are not sufficiently effective on students' problem solving performance, conceptual understanding, self-efficacy, confidence, and motivation. The result of other studies (Gok, 2015; Mazur, 1997; Shaffer & McDermott, 2005) indicated that many students especially had difficulties in learning and understanding fundamental concepts of physics. These difficulties based on misconceptions were generally encountered in the literature.

Freeman et al. (2014, p.8410) reported "students in classes with traditional lecturing were 1.5 times more likely to fail than were students in classes with active learning". Harlow, Harrison, & Meyertholen (2014) indicated the importance of students’ behavior toward physics learning in and out classroom. The behaviors, attitudes, beliefs and expectations of the students might positively be altered with the help of effective teaching strategies. Therefore the researchers (Beatty, 2004; Bretzmann, 2013; McCreary, Golde, & Koeske, 2006; Caldwell, 2007) have been developing new teaching approaches and models based on active and interactive learning for a long time. Some of these approaches are cooperative problem solving, flipped classroom, inquiry based learning, peer learning model, peer-led teaching and learning model, problem based learning, project based learning, STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) classroom, studio classroom, etc.

One of these approaches is peer instruction. Some definitions could be given concerning peer instruction: "an interactive teaching technique that promotes classroom interaction to engage students and address difficult aspects of the material" (Mazur & Watkins, 2010, p.39), "an instructional strategy for engaging students during class through structured questioning process that involves every student" (Crouch, Watkins, Fagen, & Mazur, 2007, p.4), "one approach which makes the learner more central to what is happening in the classroom, engaging them individually and in peer groups to foster individual' construction of their understanding" (Spacco, Parris, & Simon, 2013, p.1). The description of peer instruction according to Porter, Lee, Simon, & Zingaro (2011, p.1) is "students individually respond to a question, discuss with peers, and respond to the same question again." Durmont (2013) defined the method of peer instruction based on polling and challenging about students' responses. Crouch & Mazur (2001, p.970) claimed that "peer instruction modifies the traditional lecture format to include questions designed to engage students and uncover difficulties with the material." Recently, Michinov, Morice & Ferriéres (2015, p.1) have determined as "Peer Instruction (PI) is an interactive student-centered instructional strategy for engaging students in class through a structured questioning process that improves the learning of the concepts of fundamental sciences."

The roles and responsibilities of instructors and students should also be determined in peer instruction. The task of instructors is modeling appropriate social skills such as listening and providing constructive feedback more in-depth. Also they should reinforce positive behaviors by discussing the responses that students give (Giuliodori, Lujan, & DiCarlo, 2006). The students could interpret and constitute correlations between new constructing information and existing knowledge (Cortright, Collins, & DiCarlo, 2005).

Shortly, peer instruction is an interactive teaching strategy for instructors and a collaborative learning strategy for students in and out of the classroom activities. Both the instructors and the students have play an important role in this strategy. The students think, analyze, discuss, and challenge on the materials with peers on the other hand the instructors create constructivist learning environments, observe the classroom, listen to students and provide the real-time feedback.

The Theoretical Structure of Peer Instruction

Peer instruction is an interactive teaching strategy based on the constructivist learning theory and social constructivism. Yaoyuneyong & Thornton (2011, p.129) pointed out "constructivist environments are designed to both challenge and support students' thinking process and to facilitate active learning, whereby students are able to discover from themselves rather than simply receive the facts, concepts and principles in the question." They reported that the constructivist environments support the involvement of the students, allow them to take responsibility for their own learning, let them foster the problem solving skills of the students, and collaboratively help them to solve qualitative and quantitative problems in groups. Michinov et al. (2015, p.2) indicated that peer instruction is "based on a social constructivist approach to learning, in which social interaction plays a crucial role in the construction of knowledge, and where discussion and collaboration between peers have a positive impact on learning."

The Development of Peer Instruction

Mazur (1997) instructed physics courses using traditional teaching methods at Harvard University. His courses were interesting and amusing because he constantly tried to use alternative instructional strategies and assessment tools. He revealed that students were able to solve standard problems, but had difficulty in understanding some basic conceptual questions on the Force Concept Inventory. Therefore he investigated an alternative instructional strategy to solve this problem. He (1997) thought how to improve conceptual learning and problem solving performance of the students and to prevent overcoming misconceptions of the students and then he developed an interactive teaching strategy called peer instruction (PI).

Peer instruction is actually a combined teaching model. Students can do warm-up exercises with Just in Time Teaching strategy (Novak, Gavrin, Christian, & Patterson, 1999), they can increase their engagement with Tutorials in Introductory Physics (McDermott, Shaffer, & the PEG at UW, 2002) in discussion section among peers, they can solve problem with Group Problem-Solving Activities (Heller, Keith, & Anderson, 1992). Peer instruction engages students with the help of classroom activities. These activities are "reading the course material", "thinking on the concept tests or multiple-choice questions", "quantitative or qualitative problem solving", etc.

Nowadays peer instruction is conducted in conjunction with other interactive learning methods (Durmont, 2013; Gok, 2015; Mazur & Watkins, 2010; Michinov et al., 2015; Novak et al., 1999; Nicol & Boyle, 2003; Sayer, Marshman, Singh, 2016a; Simon, Esper, Porter, & Cutts 2013; Smith, Wood, Adams, Wieman, Knight, Guild, & Su, 2009; Suppapittayaporn, Emarat, & Arayathanitkul, 2010; Wang & Murota, 2016) such as flipped classroom, just in time teaching, wikis, think pair share, problem solving strategy steps, structured inquiry, stepladder technique, etc. to be more effective, efficient, and practicable.

These combined teaching models called Hybrid Peer Instruction (HPI) enhanced students' understanding, learning, interest, motivation, and attitude towards courses; encouraged students thinking about challenging fundamental concepts; helped students to improve more advanced critical thinking skills and better metacognitive skills; provided real time formative feedback to students, and helped instructors make better usage of class time.

The purpose of the research investigated the positive and negative effects of the peer instruction on students' cognitive domain (conceptual learning, conceptual reasoning, problem solving, learning gain, etc.) and affective domain (beliefs, motivation, confidence, etc.) between 1997 and 2017.