Abstract:

Engineering projects often require a multidisciplinary approach, involving individuals with different expertise. Working in groups is then crucial to solve complex problems. In teams, tasks can be divided more efficiently, discussing ideas can lead to innovative solutions, and conjunct reviews can improve the overall excellence of the project deliverables. When preparing engineering students for their actuation endeavors, educators must promote initiatives to make them work collaboratively aiming to develop their abilities.

At the university level, teamwork can face problems when there is an unequal distribution of work. Disengagement of members and loss of team cohesion can generate limited diversity of ideas, risk of poor decision-making, decrease in productivity within the group, and even poor quality of the project. Another problem is when students divide the work but fail to integrate their parts effectively, leading to inconsistencies, duplications, and lack of coherence. Peer review is a promising way to address communication problems in teamwork. By reviewing the work of the other, there is the opportunity to provide constructive feedback to ensure consistency, clarity, and alignment with project goals.

In this paper, we present an experience using structured peer review with engineering students. The idea was to create opportunities for members to voice their opinions and provide useful feedback. We divided students into pairs. Each pair was responsible for a project that included coding and analysis. The project had two parts, being one member responsible for each part. By distributing tasks equitably, we aimed to mitigate the problems associated with one member dominating the group dynamics. In the first phase, members develop their activities independently. The second phase was to perform the peer feedback using a structured form addressing aspects such as code correctness, code quality, result presentation, and result analysis. In the third phase, members improved their tasks based on the received feedback. Finally, they collaborated as desired to integrate the final report.

By evaluating the proposed experience, students stated that the project supported their learning in the addressed topics. Students explained that they were able to learn about the tasks of the colleague when doing the review and that they could improve their tasks based on the received review. Most students agreed that the structured pair review contributed to make them more confident in their jobs, to develop their critical thinking skills, to improve their analytical capabilities, and to decrease their anxiety. Students enjoyed the experience and stated that they wanted to have other opportunities to use this kind of feedback approach.

Potential drawbacks can arise when using peer review informally, including bias and subjectivity, vague or unconstructive returns, inaccurate or misleading evaluations, incomplete or unbalanced feedback, confusion or misinterpretation, and lack of formal documentation. This paper contributes with an example of how to conduct a structured peer review in collaborative projects, being a guide for educators to embrace this practice and advance with new approaches in a way to assist students’ learning and foster the development of complete engineers for our society.

Keywords:

Higher education, course design, peer review, teamwork.