Document Type

Article

Rights

Available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International Licence

Disciplines

1.2 COMPUTER AND INFORMATION SCIENCE, 1.3 PHYSICAL SCIENCES, 1.4 CHEMICAL SCIENCES, 1.5 EARTH AND RELATED ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES, 1.6 BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES, 5.3 EDUCATIONAL SCIENCES

Publication Details

Mac Raighne, A., Casey, M.M., Howard, R. and Ryan, B.J. (2015). Student Attitudes to an Online, Peer-instruction, Revision Aid in Science Education. Journal of Perspectives in Applied Academic Practice, 3, 49-60.

Abstract

Peer instruction has been shown to have a positive effect on students’ engagement and learning. However, many of the techniques designed to incorporate peer instruction into the student experience are very heavy on resources. PeerWise is a free, low-maintenance, web-tool designed to allow peer instruction between students within a large class group. Students can write, answer and discuss Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) based on their work in-class.

In this study, we introduce PeerWise to a wide and varied cohort of science students (N=509) across different disciplines, undergraduate years, levels (certificate to honours degree) and institutes. The attitudes of the students to PeerWise are probed using a questionnaire (356 respondents). This includes responses to Likert-style questions and thematic analysis carried out on free-text responses.

It is found that the students are positive about the addition of PeerWise and recognise the advantages of the software in their learning. They recognise, and articulate, the advantages of PeerWise as an active-learning, peer-instruction revision tool. Further advantages and disadvantages are discussed, such as the flooding of system with easy and/or repetitive questions. Overall, the results are positive and are very similar across the varied class groups. In this study, PeerWise performs as free and low-maintenance software that allows the addition of (another) peer-instruction aspect to modules.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.14297/jpaap.v3i1.135


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