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

Background The feedback offered to students in audience response systems may enhance 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, confidence and 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, attended each lecture following a flipped classroom approach. At the beginning of each lecture, students participated in a quiz with eight multiple-choice questions. Four of these questions included a justification form in which students could elaborate on their answers. The students were randomly grouped into two conditions according to the collective feedback they received: the Shared group (n = 54) could see both the 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 in questions with the justification form being available. Also, the two groups were comparable in terms of performance and self-reported level of confidence suggesting no main effect for making peer justification available. Despite this, students in the Shared group expressed a significantly more positive opinion in the end-of-activity questionnaire in terms 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.