How often does unguided peer interaction lead to correct response consensus? An example from Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism

In this research, we investigated the impact of peer collaboration and changes from individual to group performance of graduate students on the Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM) without any guidance from the course instructor. We define construction of knowledge as a case in which the group answered the question correctly but in the individual administration of the survey before the group work, one member gave the correct answer and the other gave the incorrect answer. We find that there was a significant improvement in the performance of students after peer interaction in pairs, which was mostly attributed to construction of knowledge. However, students had very few opportunities to co-construct knowledge as there were hardly any situations in which neither student in a group provided a correct answer. We analyzed the effect size for improvement from individual to group scores for each CSEM item to understand the characteristics of these questions that led to productive group interaction. We also compared the group performance of the graduate students to the introductory physics students in a prior study using the CSEM to get insight into the concepts that showed differences for the two groups and those that were challenging for both groups of students. Our findings can motivate physics instructors to incorporate group interactions both inside and outside of the classroom even without the instructor involvement so that students at all levels can learn from each other and develop a functional understanding of the underlying concepts.