THE EFFECTS OF PEER LEARNING ON STUDENT PERFORMANCE: A STUDY ON FIRST YEAR UNDERGRADUATE BUSINESS STUDENTS

Managing the diversity of students in a way that supports their academic performance is a huge challenge, which is magnified in large compulsory first year courses as failure rates tend to be high. One way to bridge the distance among new students in a university is to develop the habit of peer learning among them. Peer Learning is a pedagogical technique that is characterized by the attainment of knowledge and skill by peers who are at a similar level of proficiency (matched companions) [1]. It is defined as the formation of "small, structured and heterogeneous groups" to cover the content [2]. It is supposed to be a mutually beneficial experience. This study explores the effects of peer learning on student performance of first year undergraduate students enrolled in a business degree at a private university. It is a quasi-experimental post-test only design with a control and experimental group involving 180 participants. The control group was taught in the conventional manner of lecturing by a professor whereas the experimental group was taught by a combination of lecturing, and the assignment of small tasks/topics that the students had to cover themselves in groups and teach the rest of the classmates. At the end of the study, a paper based post-test was conducted and data analysis was performed to investigate the significance of the difference in the control and experimental group. Peer learning has a remarkably favorable effect on student performance.