Peer Leader Reflections on Promoting Discussion in Peer Group-Learning Sessions: Reflective and Practiced Advice through Collaborative Annual Peer-Advice Books.

As research has shown, collaborative peer learning is effective for improving student learning. Peer-led team learning (PLTL) is one well-known collaborative-group approach in which groups are facilitated by trained undergraduate peer leaders. This paper contributes to the literature on peer-leader training by examining how peer leaders for a large introductory science course translate their training into practice during their sessions. By conducting qualitative analysis on annual advice books written by emergent peer leaders, we examined the practiced advice and strategies of these peer leaders as they facilitate PLTL groups in a university-level general chemistry course. These advice books are passed on to future peer instructors, creating a community of practice between new and more experienced peer leaders. From the analysis, we discovered that peer leaders focus on developing robust student-student discussion during complex problem solving by 1) creating a community-oriented social and intellectual environment, 2) adapting their tactics and the collaborative-learning strategies to balance different personalities and promote equal participation among all students, and 3) modifying collaborative group approaches when facilitating their sessions. Also, in their correspondence across cohorts, peer leaders provided near-peer support to one another. These annual books disseminate practiced advice between peer-leader generations and are used during new peer-leader training.

A Mixed-Methods Investigation of Clicker Implementation Styles in STEM.

Active learning with clickers is a common approach in high-enrollment, lecture-based courses in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. In this study, we describe the procedures that faculty at one institution used when implementing clicker-based active learning, and how they situated these activities in their class sessions. Using a mixed-methods approach, we categorized faculty into four implementation styles based on quantitative observation data and conducted qualitative interviews to further understand why faculty used these styles. We found that faculty tended to use similar procedures when implementing a clicker activity, but differed on how they situated the clicker-based active learning into their courses. These variations were attributed to different faculty goals for using clicker-based active learning, with some using it to engage students at specific time points throughout their class sessions and others who selected it as the best way to teach a concept from several possible teaching techniques. Future research should continue to investigate and describe how active-learning strategies from literature may differ from what is being implemented.