2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In 2020-2022, various peer teaching instructional techniques were employed in both lecture and lab courses at The Citadel, a teaching focused institution in the Southeast United States. The lecture courses were Mechanics of Materials and Introduction to Geotechnical Engineering, and the lab course was Geotechnical Engineering Lab. To promote a deep understanding of the material and to directly engage students with the material, group problem solving, and Jigsaw Method of teaching were used in Mechanics of Materials. The Jigsaw Method of teaching allowed each group member to become responsible for a subcategory of a larger topic and teach it to the rest of the group and class. In Introduction to Geotechnical Engineering, each student was assigned a topic to teach to fellow classmates. The student’s lesson plan included learning objectives, hands-on activities, discussions, demonstrations, question/answer, etc. In the Geotechnical lab, two students enrolled in the course, who were familiar with various geotechnical testing methods, were recruited and took the role of peer teachers for lab experiments. The effectiveness of the peer-teaching instructional technique was assessed directly by comparing the summative assessment results of peer-led sections with those of faculty-led sections. Preliminary results show that the assessment results from peer-led sections were not significantly different from faculty-led sections. In addition, peer teaching was assessed indirectly by administrating a pre- and post- survey of students’ perception of peer-teaching. This paper discusses the institutional context, various peer teaching instructional techniques employed, detailed analyses of direct and indirect assessment results.