1. Introduction

Given today's culture and availability of different technological tools, students can no longer be left on the receiving end in the class room. Active learning methods have proven beyond doubt that the participation of students in the learning process, not only make learning fun and a challenging activity, it improves substantially the quality of learning as well[1-4].

Active learning is defined as "students being engaged in more activities than just listening. They are involved in dialog, debate, writing, and problem solving, as well as higher-order thinking, e.g., analysis, synthesis, evaluation" [2].

On the other hand Collaborative teaching is defined as: "the instructional use of small groups so that students work together to maximize their own and each other's learning" [5].

A recent study[4] examines the evidence for the effectiveness of active learning. It defines the common forms of active learning most relevant for engineering and critically examines each method. It is found that there is broad but even support for the core elements of active, collaborative, cooperative and problem-based learning.

The Peer Instruction Method of Teaching (PIMT), a collaborative teaching method, has been used in teaching a number of different courses and was proven to increase the level of understanding of the course material substantially [6-7].

The method consists of probing the students' understanding of key concepts in the course and systematically testing them on these concepts. These questions, which are taken from pools of questions prepared by professionals and then customized[8-9], are carefully designed to explore the students’ understanding of the concept. In case the number of students that understood a particular concept is below a certain threshold, students engage in pairs in convincing each other of their own argument and the test is taken again to see the effect of peer instruction.

At UAEU, we have tried PIMT for the following courses: General Physics 1 and 2 and Statistics for Engineers. The method was conducted as follows: A quiz on a certain concept was given to students who answer the questions on their own. The answer sheet was collected and then each student was allowed to discuss his/her answer with his/her neighbor for a few minutes. A second round of the same quiz was given to students again. The comparison of the answers of students should clearly indicate the effect of the peer interaction between the students.

In the present work, we report the results of the effect of PIMT on the improvement of the understanding level of students in introductory courses of physics and statistics.

2. Results and Discussion

To study the effect of PIMT on student learning, we used a few simple statistical techniques to compare the performance of students before and after peer instruction.

First, and to get a feel of the magnitude of improvement in student performance, we determined the percentage increase in average scores for each of the 38 tests used. Table 1 shows that the average scores for all but 2 tests have increased.

Table 1. Quizzes for different courses, sections, and instructors with grade averages before and after the use of PIMT

The percent improvements ranged from 4.5% to 145.3%. The overall improvement rate for all tests is 39%. The decrease in some of the tests is due to the fact that these tests consisted of 2 multiple-choice questions and as one can guess the chance of missing the right answer is greater.

Individual paired t-tests (and Wilcoxon signed-rank tests when the differences were not normally distributed) were used to see which of the above improvements were statistically significant. 52% turned out to be significant at the 1% level. The results are shown in Table 2.

Table 2. Quizzes for different courses, sections, and instructors showing the paired t-test (Wilcoxon*) statistics and p-values for each quiz

As for the significance of the overall improvement, weighted averages, were computed before and after peer instruction, and a paired t-test was performed. The results are shown in table 3. The overall improvement turned out to be significant with a p-value of 0.0008.

The McNemar test was used to determine whether there is any significant improvement in the rate of students passing the tests after peer instruction. Table 4 shows the percentages of pass and fail before and after PIMT. The results of the test show significant improvements in the test success rate with a p-value less than .0001. The overall pass rate went from 68.1% to 87.6%, while the fail rate went down from 31.9% to 12.4%.

Table 3. Paired t-test for overall improvement

Table 4. McNemar test for success rate improvement

Finally, to see whether the academic standing of students has anything to do with the effect of PIMT, we computed correlations between student cumulative GPA and the difference in average scores. The Pearson correlation coefficient was weak and valued at 0.27 as seen in Table 5, and even though the parallel box-plots in Figure 1 show an increasing trend in the average score differences as the GPA increases, the one-way ANOVA results in Table 6 shows the insignificance of that trend with a p-value of .083.

Table 5. Correlation between GPA and PIMT results

Table 6. ANOVA on effect of GPA on PIMT results

Instructors who use traditional method of teaching, normally, skip peer discussion entirely, believing that instructor explanation of the correct reasoning will be more clear and accurate than an explanation by other students, and will therefore lead to more student learning. Although our current work does not directly compare the benefits of instructor versus peer explanation, research in physics has shown that instructor explanations often fail to produce gains in conceptual understanding[11]. The results of the present work shows that peer discussion can effectively promote such understanding. Furthermore, justifying an explanation to a fellow student and skeptically examining the explanation of a peer provide valuable opportunities for students to develop the communicative and metacognitive skills that are crucial components of disciplinary expertise.

Figure 1. Parallel Box-Plot Comparison of PIMT effect for different academic standings

3. Conclusions

The results of PIMT experiments carried out in different introductory courses with different instructors showed a significant improving effect of this collaborative teaching method on the students’ understanding of concepts and their problem solving capabilities. It remains to be investigated how the PIMT affects the overall performance of the students in the common exams when compared to students who did not use this method.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was financially supported by the Research Affairs at the UAE University under a contract no. 05-02-2-11/07.