Assessing the effectiveness of peer instruction in students' understanding of electric circuits concepts

This paper describes the implementation of an active learning strategy, called Peer Instruction, in an undergraduate electric circuit analysis course offered at a large public university in Colombia. Peer Instruction is an instructional approach that fosters students' collaboration to increase conceptual understanding. Data was collected from three sections of the course mentioned above. In two sections, students attended a traditional class format (51 students) while another section (15 students) implemented the Peer Instruction methodology. The research question driving this project was whether Peer Instruction would produce significantly higher learning gains than the traditional blackboard and chalk approach. A difference was determined using a quasi-experimental study comparing the learning gains of the students in the traditional sections (i.e., the control group) versus those of the students in the Peer Instruction section (i.e., the experimental group). The learning gains were measured by pre/post application of an adapted version of the DIRECT concept inventory which was translated into Spanish. Preliminary results suggest that the implementation of a Peer Instruction approach in an electric circuit analysis course improves the performance of students on the adapted version of the DIRECT test. © American Society for Engineering Education, 201