  Peer Instruction (PI) and Continuous Assessment(CA) are two distinct
educational techniques with extensive research demonstrating their
effectiveness. The work herein combines PI and CA in a deliberate and novel
manner to pair students together for a PI session in which they collaborate on
a CA task. The data used to inform the pairing method is restricted to the most
previous CA task students completed independently. The motivation for this
data-driven collaborative learning is to improve student learning,
communication, and engagement. Quantitative results from an investigation of
the method show improved assessment scores on the PI CA tasks, although
evidence of a positive effect on subsequent individual CA tasks was not
statistically significant as anticipated. However, student perceptions were
positive, engagement was high, and students interacted with a broader set of
peers than is typical. These qualitative observations, together with extant
research on the general benefits of improving student engagement and
communication (e.g. improved sense of belonging, increased social capital,
etc.), render the method worthy for further research into building and
evaluating small student learning communities using student assessment data.
