A Multi-Institutional Study on Peer Instruction: Evaluating Text-Chat with Assigned Group Members vs Verbal Discussion

In Peer Instruction (PI) an instructor displays a challenging multiple-choice question during lecture that students answer individually, discuss verbally with nearby peers, answer individually again, and finally, the instructor leads a discussion of the question. Peer Instruction typically increases student learning and motivation over traditional lecture. We added a text-chat mode to improve PI for remote synchronous learning. This feature assigns students to discussion groups to maximize the number of groups that have members with different answers. The tool was pilot tested in Winter 2022 and revised. In Fall 2022 and Winter 2023, it was tested at one institution. In Fall 2024, it was tested at four institutions. We conducted a log file analysis of student data from 1394 students and analyzed surveys with 848 student responses. We found that questions answered using the text-chat had a significantly higher improvement than those using traditional verbal discussion, although the two modes were tested with different questions. Interestingly, most of the students preferred to discuss the question verbally, although some preferred the text-chat discussion. These results inform efforts to improve the effectiveness of Peer Instruction and increase its adoption.