Increase Student Engagement and Learning using a Free Tool for Peer Instruction

Decades of research on Peer Instruction (PI) have shown that it improves student engagement, retention, and learning in many fields, including computing. In PI, as defined by Eric Mazur of Harvard, the instructor displays a difficult multiple-choice question during lecture which students first answer individually, then discuss with nearby peers, and then answer individually again. We created a free tool, Peer+, for Peer Instruction and tested it over several semesters at multiple institutions (University of Michigan, Duke University, Virginia Tech, and Berea College) on over 1,000 students. Peer+ is freely available in the open-source ebook platform Runestone Academy. Instructors can use any of the 90+ free ebooks on that platform or use an empty ebook. There are ebooks for Advanced Placement Computer Science, CS1 (Python, Java, and C++), CS2 in C++ and Java, and Discrete Math. We added hundreds of existing PI questions to these ebooks, which instructors can use or they can create their own multiple-choice questions. In this tutorial you will learn best practices for Peer Instruction and gain hands-on experience creating PI assignments, browsing existing PI questions, writing new PI questions, and grading PI assignments. You will also experience PI sessions using three different modes for peer discussion: traditional verbal discussion with nearby peers, text-chat with assigned group members, and text-chat with an LLM for students answering questions after lecture.