Peer Instruction for Digital Forensics

Digital forensics can be a difficult discipline to teach effectively because of its interdisciplinary nature, closely integrating law and computer science. Prior research in Physics and Computer Science has shown that the traditional lecture approach is inadequate for the task of provoking students’ thought-processes and systematically engaging them in problem-solving during class. Peer instruction is an established pedagogy for addressing some of the challenges of traditional lectures. For this paper, we developed 108 peer instruction questions for a digital forensics curriculum, and evaluated a selection of the questions by holding a condensed computer forensics workshop for university students. The evaluation results show that peer instruction helps students understand the targeted digital forensics concepts, and that 91% of students would recommend that other instructors use peer instruction.