Peer Instruction, Mobile Technology and Learning Effectiveness

The major objective of this study is to have a trial application of Peer Instruction (PI), an innovative pedagogy invented by Eric Mazur in early 1990s, in accounting education. A secondary objective is to test the mobile technology as a medium in applying PI. Involving students in teaching and learning, PI has been proved to be highly successful and widely adopted in various disciplines. Combining UReply as a mobile-enabled platform, we tested the effectiveness of PI. In particular, Intermediate Accounting, a technically challenging accounting course, has been employed as the experiment subject. During September to October, 2017, 6 rounds of PI for 3 topics were carried out. Overall, the resulted 459 valid observations show that, after the peer discussion, (1) the percentage of students hitting the right answer has an average increase of 17.24%;(2) students changing from the wrong answer to right answer is more than 3 times of those changing for the opposite direction. Results hold for both qualitative and quantitative questions. The post-test discussion also shows that students reckoned the benefits of PI through UReply. This pilot study demonstrates that PI can also be effectively applied in difficult accounting subjects with modern technology. Echoing the existing literature, however, the success of PI reigns over many factors including culture differences, participants’ motivation, well-designed and tested questions at appropriate complexity and difficulty level.