In my contribution, I am going to present the outcomes of innovating the course Introduction to Evolutionary Anthropology, a graduate-level course that is a part of the study programme Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the Faculty of Arts, Comenius University in Bratislava.
While teaching this course in the past, I identified two major challenges: to increase student engagement during the course sessions and to change the student approach to preparation, i.e. to encourage students to prepare for each session rather than only for the end-of-the-term exam. I chose to address these challenges by creating numerous opportunities for students to engage in peer learning, for example by quizzes in the form of a collaborative search for answers to questions regarding activities, followed by discussions. One of those activities was visiting a museum exhibition, where students worked together in finding answers to predetermined questions. The visit to the exhibition was followed by a quiz and group discussion.
In this paper, I explore if peer learning helped students achieve the course learning outcomes.
To evaluate the effectiveness of peer learning in this course, I triangulate four sources of data: my own reflective diary; results of student final exams; student perceptions of peer learning activities, and peer observation by my colleague.
