Peer Instruction with Audience Response Systems-Short Guide to Creating Questions for Peer Instruction

Short Guide to Creating Questions for Peer Instruction

Pdf Summary

This November 2020 guide from UNM Continuing Professional Learning provides essential advice for creating effective questions for peer instruction, emphasizing their design to stimulate interactive learning. Key points for question development include ensuring questions are challenging enough so that only about 30-70% of students initially answer correctly. This difficulty level fosters meaningful peer discussion and debate.<br /><br />Effective questions should focus on higher-order cognitive skills—application, analysis, and evaluation—rather than simple recall. Distractors (incorrect options) must be plausible or nearly correct, often incorporating common misconceptions to promote conceptual understanding through peer discussion. The guide warns against questions that simply test memory of content as presented, advocating instead for questions that require students to construct answers.<br /><br />To aid question writing, the guide includes an adapted overview of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning in the Cognitive Domain. It outlines six cognitive processes—Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, and Create—with descriptions of learner actions, relevant action verbs for outcome statements, and examples across factual, conceptual, procedural, and metacognitive knowledge types. For example, “Apply” involves using concepts in new situations, while “Analyze” involves examining relationships and drawing inferences.<br /><br />In summary, the guide encourages instructors to design peer instruction questions that challenge students to engage deeply with content, use reasoning, and address misconceptions, leveraging Bloom’s taxonomy to craft questions that promote critical thinking and collaborative learning. Additionally, it references resources such as the Just in Time Learning module on writing questions for learning and assessment to support educators in this process.

Keywords

Peer instruction

Question design

Interactive learning

Bloom's Taxonomy

Higher-order cognitive skills

Conceptual understanding

Misconceptions

Critical thinking

Collaborative learning

Assessment strategies