Application of peer instruction in the laboratory task of measuring the effective mass of a spring

Abstract

Peer instruction (PI) is an effective interactive approach to teaching and learning that has principally been used to modify the experience of learning in traditional physics lecture settings. This article further illustrates how the concept of PI can be effectively applied in the physics student laboratory setting. The setting used is a laboratory task that calls for the measurement of the effective mass of the spring of a Jolly balance. Through PI the students gain a better understanding of what is meant by the construct ‘effective mass of a spring’, and thereby competently work out how the mass, shape, wire diameter, and number of turns of the spring can all affect the effective mass of the spring. Furthermore, using stopwatches the students were also able to appreciate how recorded times at the equilibrium position had greater uncertainty than measurements made at the maximum displacement. This led to their calculations of the effective mass of the spring being impressively close to the theoretical value. Such laboratory tasks are extremely challenging to introductory level students and the success attained by the students in this study indicates that there is much potential in the application of PI in laboratory settings. PI should be used to teach in the laboratory and results should be reported in order for our community to build on these experiences. This article is a contribution to that effort.

Improved content mastery and written communication through a lab-report assignment with peer review: an example from a quantum engineering course

“…Peer response and writing process designs have been used in science education, see e.g. references [51] and [52], and peer instruction is studied in the PER-context [53,54], but we believe we offer a closer analysis of its impact and a transferable rationale for the design.…”

A quantitative analysis of the interaction among students in peer instruction classes

“…Recent literature reviews have shown that PI is an effective teaching method (Vickrey et al 2015, Müller et al 2017. Although most investigations report the use of PI as an alternative to traditional lectures, it was also proven to be effective in laboratory classes (Zhang et al 2017).…”