Abstract:

Peer learning has been gaining traction in the higher education sector as a pedagogical strategy for didactic and practical reasons. Although work has been done to identify how learners should be engaging in peer learning to maximise its benefits, little has been done to translate this work into products that are implementable in the classrooms to guide learners to maximise the benefits of peer learning in the absence of close supervision and guidance by educators.

The present work focuses on understanding behaviours and/or mental processes in the context of informal peer learning that predict when learners maximise acquisition of skills and content relevant to performance in an introductory humanities course. Using the exploratory-sequential approach, semi-structured interviews were first conducted with five students to explore behaviours and/or mental processes in the informal peer learning context that led to ideal or less-than-ideal performance for the final examinations. It was found that students’ willingness to develop independence of thought during informal peer discussions may be a crucial predictor of performance during final examinations.

Then, 447 students participated in a survey where a scale was developed using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses to measure students’ willingness to develop independence of thought. The results of the survey suggest that the construct was indeed a significant predictor of final examination performance, even after controlling for factors like intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to learn and metacognitive self-regulation exercised in relation to informal peer discussions. The newly developed scale serves as a starting point for creating self-diagnostic tests that help students monitor and reflect on the effectiveness of their use of peer learning activities.

Keywords:

Informal collaborative learning, self-directed learning, higher-order thinking skills, humanities education.