Peer to Peer Synchronous Interaction and Student Engagement: A Perspective of Postgraduate Management Students in a Developing Country

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the association between synchronous peer to peer interaction (PPSI) and student engagement in postgraduate management units in Bangladesh. Understanding of this association focused on outcomes of engagement with learning materials and workplace relevant learning. This study utilized an interventional and convergent parallel mixed methods research design. A PPSI intervention, involving teamwork of five students from working and non-working status, was applied on 80 students in two different management units. The intervention was followed by a survey on student's perception of the association between PPSI and student engagement, which received 80% response rate. Content analysis was applied to the qualitative survey data while quantitative data were analyzed with SPSS software. Participant profile were 60% female, 95% below the age of 30 and 71% having work experience. The study found a significant positive association (r =.53) between PPSI and student engagement in postgraduate management study in Bangladesh. Peer to peer interaction helped students to collect different viewpoints, engage with learning material and practice workplace relevant skills. However, success of PPSI is influenced by factors such as task design, student's attitude toward teamwork and ease of use of technology. This study is first of its kind to explore the in-depth relationship between PPSI and student engagement in an education setting in a developing country. It could open avenues for further research on designing and implementation of PPSI for student centered and work relevant learning, across developed and developing countries.

Can Peer to Peer Interaction (PPI) be a Global Theme to Promote Engagement in Students of Diverse Characteristics and Country Contexts

“…Australia (Horvath et al, 2019). In comparison, the technology condition (for example, availability of a university's own online learning platform or access to social media such as Facebook) is much inferior in higher education in the developing country (Siddiqui et al, 2019). However, most students in the developing country benefited from the tested PPI assessment despite the technical difficulties.…”

“…A foundational literature to understand students' experience of PPI is the pedagogy of social constructivism, which proposes students achieve deeper learning with constructive peer interactions (Powell & Kalina, 2009). Academics need to spend substantial time and resources to design PPIs with features of social constructivism such as critical thinking, collaborative tasks and the task being meaningful to students (Powell & Kalina, 2009;Siddiqui, Miah, & Ahmad, 2019;Van Bergen & Parsell, 2019). Students experiencing effective PPIs were reported to have greater success with teamwork and enhancement of skills such as problem-solving, communication, learning autonomy, work related cognition and ethical thinking (Siddiqui et al, 2019;Stigmar, 2016; University of the Free State, 2019).…”

“…In these announcements, a link was provided for students to participate in the survey via survey monkey. Further information on the survey procedure in the developing country, is available in an earlier publication (Siddiqui et al, 2019).…”

“…Peer to peer interaction (PPI) is recognised as a common theme of student engagement (Kahu & Nelson, 2018;Zhoc, Webster, Li, & Chung, 2018). Understanding of the PPI is also evolving, being an important aspect of ongoing investigations of student engagement (Siddiqui, Miah, & Ahmad, 2019).…”

“…Previous literature evidenced the beneficial influence of PPI in higher education across different countries, but also pointed out that more than 60% of studies in the review belonged to the western education context (Stigmar, 2016). The study of PPI in Asian developing country contexts is underrepresented (Siddiqui et al, 2019) and a comparative assessment of PPI between contrasting education contexts (for example, developing versus developed country) is exceptional.…”