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Background: The feedback offered to students in audience response systems may enhance conformity bias, while asking closed-type questions alone does not allow students to externalize and elaborate on their knowledge. Objectives: The study explores how writing short justifications and accessing peer justifications as collective feedback could affect students' performance, confidence and opinions in multiple-choice audience response systems that apply the Peer Instruction model of voting/revoting. Methods: For 8 weeks, 98 students, enrolled in an undergraduate course, attended each lecture following a flipped classroom approach. At the beginning of each lecture, students participated in a quiz with eight multiple-choice questions. Four of these questions included a justification form in which students could elaborate on their answers. The students were randomly grouped into two conditions according to the collective feedback they received: the Shared group (n = 54) could see both the percentage each question choice received from the class and the respective peer justifications, while the Unshared group (n = 44) could only see the percentage information. Results: Analysis showed that students in both groups performed significantly better in questions with the justification form being available. Also, the two groups were comparable in terms of performance and self-reported level of confidence suggesting no main effect for making peer justification available. Despite this, students in the Shared group expressed a significantly more positive opinion in the end-of-activity questionnaire in terms of perceived learning gains and the helpfulness of writing justifications for their answers. Take Away: Writing short justifications can have a positive impact on students' academic performance.

This paper investigates the impact of the proposed ‘Make It Explicit!’ technique on students' learning when participating in scripted collaborative activities. The method posits that when asking students to proactively articulate their own positions explicitly, then improved peer interaction is triggered in a subsequent collaborative session. Forty-two (42) students worked collaboratively in dyads on a peer-review-scripted task with the aid of a Web-based technological system. Students were asked to individually study the same material and produce answers to study questions, review their peer's work and, finally, produce collaboratively revised common answers to the study questions. Dyads were randomly assigned in two conditions: low coercion (LC) and high coercion (HC). In the HC condition, students were required to write and submit to the system their reviews, prior to the task of producing the common answers to the study questions. In the LC condition, instead, submitting the individual review to the system was optional. By collecting and analysing both quantitative (pre- and post-test scores, measures of individual and collaborative learning) and qualitative (interviews, log files) data, it is shown that students in the HC condition applied better collaboration patterns and outperformed students in the LC condition in acquiring domain conceptual knowledge. Overall, this work analyses key aspects of implementing the ‘Make It Explicit!’ technique and concludes that it can efficiently improve collaborative learning outcomes by increasing script coercion.