Evaluating the efficacy of clicker-based peer instruction across multiple courses at a single institution

Peer Instruction (PI) is an evidence-based interactive teaching method popularized by Harvard Professor Eric Mazur in teaching physics and is seeing increased adoption in computer science education. This paper examines the efficacy of PI at a medium-sized university whose primary focus is on undergraduate education. By employing instruments used in prior studies by other researchers, we are able to situate our findings within the broader research space. While our data is not as overwhelmingly positive as what is reported in prior work, we still find that the large majority (83%) of students find value in PI. Furthermore, we explore the impact that instructor experience, grading questions on correctness, and the re-polling of questions have on student satisfaction.