An Analysis of Peer-submitted and Peer-reviewed Answer Rationales in a Web-based Peer Instruction Based Learning Environment

This paper reports on an analyis of data from a novel Peer Instruction application, named DALITE. The Peer Instruction paradigm is well suited to take advantage of peer-input in web-based learning environments. DALITE implements an asynchronous instantiation of peer instruction: after submitting their answer to a multiple-choice question, students are asked to write a rationale for their choice. Then, they can compare their answer to other students’ answers, and are asked to choose the best peer-submitted rationale among those displayed. We engaged in an analysis of student behaviour and learning outcomes in the DALITE learning environment. Specifically, we focus our investigation on the relationship between student proficiency, how students change their answers after reading each others’ writings, and the peer-votes they earn in DALITE. Key results include i) peervotes earned is a significant predictors of success in the course; ii) there are no significant differences between strong and weak students in how often they switch from the correct answer to a wrong answer after consulting peer-rationales, or vice versa; iii) even though males outscore females in conceptual physics questions, females earn as many votes from their peers as males do for the content they produce when justifying their answer choices.