Peer Teaching in Construction Project Management Scheduling

Abstract

A peer-teaching method has been implemented in Construction Project Management Scheduling (CPMS) course that focuses on Project Management Software (PMS) learning. The two graduate students, who had recently graduated from our undergraduate programs and were enrolled in the CPMS course were required to learn and teach the PMS package, Primavera, (as their course project) to the remaining undergraduate students in the course. This learning method promotes topic retention, as the student is required to be the expert on the topic. The students were only required to teach this one topic, which consisted of one class period (~2hrs). The results were verified through in-course surveys, objectively comparing assignment grades from a professor taught PMS (Microsoft Project), and graduate student reflection summary. The results show that the graduate students not only enjoyed teaching the topic, but they feel that their comprehension had increased by the employed teaching method. Additionally, the results show that the undergraduates students' learning was not adversely affected by having their fellow students provide instruction on software usage. The survey also indicates that the undergraduate students preferred the peer-teaching method to standard professor lecture and demonstration. The paper concludes with recommendations for future work.

Student Peer Lecture in Capstone Design Project

“…When we brainstormed some new activities for our capstone design project course, we believe that four fundamental requirements for new activities are (1) It is still a presentation, (2) It can promote active learning, (3) Each design team can benefit from new activities, and (4) They can share their self-learned contents and life-long learning experience. We believe that student peer lectures can satisfy all the above requirements [18][19][20][21]. After discussions among faculty and student design teams, we added a student peer lecture to the senior capstone design project course in the second semester.…”