Abstract:

The main objective of this paper is to present a pilot experience on peer review based evaluation developed in one group of a first year subject, Physics, in the degree of Electronic Engineering at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV). During all the year, the students are asked to work in teams to deliver exercises which have been previously solved at home, to be evaluated by the members of other team. Three different tools have been used to analyse the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the use of this type of evaluation: a survey, an open-ended questions survey and a personal interview. Results show that, in one hand, the marks obtained by the students are very similar when obtained by the peer review or by the teacher correction, and no representative differences are found. It is important to point out that this result was quite unexpected by our students. On the other hand, results of the survey show that the students give a positive evaluation of the peer review method itself, while some negative responses about the process of the correction and the coordination problems between the teams are found in the open-ended survey and in the interviews. The main conclusions are that the process used for each team to send the exercise and for other teams to send the evaluation results has to be improved. Moreover, the peer review evaluation has been validated as a useful tool, mainly in two ways: helping to obtain the marks of the activities delivered by the students, and helping our students to improve their integral training by making the effort of evaluating the work done by their colleagues.