The effects of peer instruction through social learning environment towards students’ cognitive load and learning performance

Abstract

The use of social media like Facebook as an educational tool has been reported to be able to promote learning and serve as a learning platform. However, Facebook also contributes to promote increased mental demand or Cognitive Load (CL). It is a challenge to learning due to the limitation of the working memory for information processing can have effects on learning performance. This situation has not been well emphasized by most instructors. Studies reported that Peer Instruction (PI) learning strategy has the potential to reduce CL while also improving learning performance but implementation of PI in social media is rather new. Thus, this study focuses on the development of a framework for best practices on the use of social media for education through enhancing learning performance and reducing CL using PI. A two-phase study was implemented for this purpose where Phase 1 involved a survey to 226 students at a Malaysian public university to identify students’ experience of CL during learning on social media. Findings confirm that students experience distractions during learning on Facebook with third party activities identified as the most distracting. Phase 2 was a mixed method study design involving a purposeful sample of 12 postgraduate students who underwent learning with Facebook. This study investigates the effect of PI for enhancing learning performance and reducing CL. Wilcoxon signed-rank test showed a significant reduction in students CL (p < 0.05) with a corresponding significant improvement in learning performance (p < 0.05) when PI was employed as an instructional strategy. A qualitative study involved collection of student reflections, participation data in whole class discussions and data from a focus group session were analysed using NVivo 10 CAQDAS software to aid the coding process. Findings showed CL sources on learning with social media include mental, time and affective demands. PI was found to bring about the reduction of CL through the following elements; ConcepTests, voting, peer discussion and mediated pre-class reading. A modified framework of PI implementation was developed that incorporates online mode, whole-class peer discussions in pre-class and post-class settings, pre-class ConcepTests, voting and mediated pre-class reading as means to reduce cognitive load. It highlights how the advantages of social media can be optimized. Findings from the study have implications for curriculum and instructional design and how it can support learning by reducing CL through PI.