Let me explain! The effects of writing and reading short justifications on students' performance, confidence and opinions in audience response systems

Abstract

Background: The feedback offered to students in audience response systems mayenhance conformity bias, while asking closed-type questions alone does not allow students to externalize and elaborate on their knowledge. Objectives: The study explores how writing short justifications and accessing peer justifications as collective feedback could affect students' performance, confidenceand opinions in multiple-choice audience response systems that apply the Peer Instruction model of voting/revoting. Methods: For 8 weeks, 98 students, enrolled in an undergraduate course, attendedeach lecture following a flipped classroom approach. At the beginning of each lec-ture, students participated in a quiz with eight multiple-choice questions. Four of these questions included a justificationform in which students could elaborate ontheir answers. The students were randomly grouped into two conditions accordingto the collective feedback they received: the Shared group (n=54) could see boththe percentage each question choice received from the class and the respective peer justifications, while the Unshared group (n=44) could only see the percentage information. Results: Analysis showed that students in both groups performed significantly better inquestions with the justification form being available. Also, the two groups were compa-rable in terms of performance and self-reported level of confidence suggesting no maineffect for making peer justification available. Despite this, students in the Shared group expressed a significantly more positive opinion in the end-of-activity questionnaire interms of perceived learning gains and the helpfulness of writing justifications for their answers. Take Away: Writing short justifications can have a positive impact on students' academic performance.