Do you ever read a piece of research and wish you could take that idea and run with it?<\/p>\n
As part of their special collection on Education & Technology<\/a>, Science<\/em> published a report Why Peer Discussion Improves Student Performance on In-Class Concept Questions<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n In a lecture theatre containing tens or hundreds of students, individuals are reluctant to speak up when the lecturer addresses questions to the audience. Interactivity can be introduced by providing each student with a clicker and posing a multiple-choice question. The audience responds via the appropriate buttons on the clicker and the combined results can be displayed and discussed. (This technology is used to Ask the Audience on Who wants to be a millionaire?<\/a>).<\/p>\n In the report, Smith et al<\/em> used this technology to test whether peer discussion could improve student performance on in-class questions, even when none of the students in the discussion group knew the answer. According to their findings, discussions were<\/em> useful even when none of the students in the discussion group answered correctly individually.<\/p>\n Examinations are looming large in my mind at the moment<\/a>. I have long maintained a wish for the opportunity to collaborate in an exam setting – I remember cursing that at A-level, my peers and I could not check each others’ maths papers for those trivial errors that often trip me up.<\/p>\n I would be more than willing to use my upcoming exams to extend Smith’s investigation. If we as a study group were allowed to discuss our answers, I hypothesize that we would be able to cobble together an answer to some of the problems, even if each of us alone were stumped.<\/p>\n Having said that, coursework this past term was the focus of several Do you ever read a piece of research and wish you could take that idea and run with it? As part of their special collection on Education & Technology, Science published a report Why Peer Discussion Improves Student Performance on … Continue reading desparate<\/del> fruitful discussions and between us we managed to formulate some reasonable responses to the problems we were set in class. We can hope that what we learnt in those late nights in the pub<\/del> computer lab will have rubbed off when we turn over the paper.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"