Multi-institutional assessment of Peer Instruction implementation and impacts using the Framework for Interactive Learning in Lectures

TL;DR

This multi-institutional study evaluates how different implementations of Peer Instruction affect student learning in physics courses, using classroom observations and the FILL+ framework.

Contribution

It introduces a framework for classifying Peer Instruction activities and links implementation variations to student learning outcomes across multiple institutions.

Findings

Instructors using both interactive and vicarious strategies show larger learning gains.

Implementation varies significantly across institutions and instructors.

Preliminary results suggest a combination of strategies enhances student learning.

Abstract

Substantial research indicates that active learning methods improve student learning more than traditional lecturing. Accordingly, current studies aim to characterize and evaluate different instructors' implementations of active learning methods. Peer Instruction is one of the most commonly used active learning methods in undergraduate physics instruction and typically involves the use of classroom response systems (e.g., clickers) where instructors pose conceptual questions that students answer individually and/or in collaboration with nearby peers. Several research studies have identified that different instructors vary in the ways they implement Peer Instruction (e.g., the time they give students to answer a question and the time they spend explaining the correct answer); however, these studies only take place at a single institution and do not relate the implementation of Peer Instruction to student learning. In this study, we analyze variation in both the implementation and impacts of Peer Instruction. We use classroom video observations and conceptual inventory data from seven introductory physics instructors across six U.S. institutions. We characterize implementation using the Framework for Interactive Learning in Lectures (FILL+), which classifies classroom activities as interactive (e.g., clicker questions), vicarious interactive (e.g., individual students asking a question), or non-interactive (e.g., instructor lecturing). Our preliminary results suggest that instructors who use both interactive and vicarious interactive strategies may exhibit larger student learning gains than instructors who predominantly use only one of the two strategies.