INTRODUCING AUTOMATED PEER-REVIEW ASSIGNMENTS IN MASS LECTURES: ACCEPTANCE AND CHALLENGES

In courses organized as mass lectures with only one final exam, students tend to start learning only at short notice before the exam, and tend to forget relevant topics soon afterwards. In order to counteract this bulimic learning behavior and to motivate students to keep up with classes, (voluntary) homework assignments have proved to be a good means to this end.
Up to now, homework assignments were organized as multiple choice questions administered and evaluated automatically by our university’s e-learning platform. Due to recently implemented new features of the platform, homework assignments can now be given as open response questions with additional peer review functionality, aiming for higher levels of educational objectives (according to Bloom’s taxonomy). Hence, students have to deal more intensely with the subject and may increase their knowledge through cooperative learning processes.

The credits a certain student may achieve for such a peer review assignment is influenced by several factors, which are intertwined and can be weighted according to the preferences of the instructor: the quality of the student’s response, as perceived by the instructor and/or other students who evaluate the response, and how correct this certain students judges the responses of other students he has to evaluate (e.g. if he gives top credits for a bad response, his own credits will suffer).
In a pilot project we introduced such a peer-review homework assignment in the course “Introductory Finance”, and tested student’s acceptance of this change from the usual multiple choice assignments with an additional survey.

Our evaluation gives rather satisfactory results: Regarding the peer review process itself, we find that most students are apt to evaluate other students’ response correctly, their ratings being very similar to the instructors’ ratings. We also found a positive relationship between solving the assignment and solving certain more challenging items at the following exam. Moreover, students’ feedback in the survey has been extremely positive, with some ideas for improvement as well.

Therefore, after some additional finetuning of the algorithm which calculates the credits, we plan to make peer review assignments a fixed part of our course in the future.