Last week, two CSE teaching professors, Leo Porter and Beth Simon, were awarded the Best Paper Award at Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) 2016. Their winning paper, "A Multi-institutional Study of Peer Instruction in Introductory Computing"*, was selected from among 105 accepted papers. This is the authors' second Best Paper Award at SIGCSE since its inception in 2011. They previously received the award at SIGCSE 2013 for their work, "Retaining Nearly One-Third More Majors with a Trio of Instructional Best Practices in CS1."
The paper examines inter-institutional variance in student perceptions of the evidence-based instructional practice called Peer Instruction (PI), which has previously been shown to reduce fail rates in computer science courses by 60 percent. The key finding of the new SIGCSE paper is that even "first-time" adoption of the practice by faculty resulted in positive evaluations by students, with an average of 91 percent recommending that other faculty should use PI. The study also identified ways in which faculty might not experience such good results, notably if they require students to get clicker questions correct to get points (not a recommended PI practice).
"This work is really about faculty adoption of evidence-based teaching practices," said Porter. In addition to documenting positive student valuation, Porter also points out that the authors "also found the instructors themselves valued the shift and were happy to have made the change."
For background, Peer Instruction is a flipped classroom pedagogy where students prepare for class through readings and/or videos and then, in class, the "lecture" centers on students answering and discussing challenging conceptual questions. The algorithm for PI consists of students answering a question individually (often with clickers), then discussing with peers, then voting again (often with a clicker) and finally a class-wide discussion led by the instructor.
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* Leo Porter, Dennis Bouvier, Quintin Cutts, Scott Grissom, Cynthia Lee, Robert McCartney, Daniel Zingaro, and Beth Simon. 2016. A Multi-institutional Study of Peer Instruction in Introductory Computing. In Proceedings of the 47th ACM Technical Symposium on Computing Science Education (SIGCSE '16).