Relationship between normalized learning gains of individuals and their typical role in group discussions with peers
Abstract
In 1985 it was shown by Hestenes and Hallouin that the majority of college students was able to state Newton's third Law at the beginning of their introductory Physics courses but not many of them fully understood it at the end of courses. In fact the courses changed practically nothing on students' input misconceptions about Newtonian mechanics.
That made Eric Mazur, professor of physics at Harvard University, to completely change his teaching approach. He abandoned classic lectures and came up with his peer instruction strategy.
Peer instruction is an active learning method which effectiveness is based primarily on the group discussion that was raised by the conceptual question of the so-called ConcepTest. Students who understand the discussed concept freshly know how to overcome the difficulties and speak the same language as their peers and therefore they are more likely to help them than the instructor himself.
Although peer instruction is one of the most surveyed teaching methods so far, not many studies have been aimed on its implementation in mathematics neither in elementary school education. The goal of our study is therefore to find answers for following questions: a) Is it possible to fulfill promises of peer instruction in mathematics at lower secondary school level? b) Are there similar outcomes that were promised by research studies of this method in physics or at the university level education? In order to find answers for stated questions action research has been realized since the beginning of previous school year 2018/2019 with a single class of thirty 8th grade pupils' participants (now 9th grade) at a Czech grammar school.
The keynote was to compare the class with itself before and after implementation of peer instruction and to compare it with global datasets (PISA, TIMSS, etc.). There were used tests and questionnaires to find out about pupils' attitude towards mathematics, their motivation structures and understanding of mathematical concepts.
In a spirit of action research several pupils were selected to form a reflexive group which has met up monthly since the beginning of 2018/2019. The objective of reflexive group was to suggest appropriate improvements to simplify peer instruction implementation in lover secondary school mathematics and to discuss over continuous results.
We have found that there is a relationship between normalized learning gains (introduced by Richard R. Hake in 1998) obtained by individuals and their typical role in group discussions over ConcepTests.
This particular result could be found in this article together with examples of several tasks from the test that was designed to measure pupils' pre/post-understanding of geometric concepts and their pre/post-argumentation skills.