Came across this brand-spanking-new study on Peer Instruction with this cool graph from a previous study in it:

What you are seeing here is a chart of right/wrong responses for a 3 question sequence in a Peer Instruction test — 1st question, 1st question after Peer Instruction, then results for an isomorphic question to test true transfer.

And it’s fascinating. It’s like watching a network fix itself. (Except it is not just the network, it’s the structure around that network that makes it so effective).

You really want to read the full study though to see the beauty of this…the authors do a really nice job of discussing the ways of thinking about how to effectively track student progress, etc. And they make an important discovery regarding isomorphic questions — asked to write an isomorphic question a professor almost always writes a *harder* question than the original, and this tendency tends to mask student progress.