Abstract:

In this paper we present our initial experience and assessment of the impact of incorporating peer grading or peer review during formative assessment activities in the classroom. By peer review or grading we refer to allowing students to review or grade their peers’ answers to formative assessment questions by providing their assessment of correctness and feedback comments. This activity was facilitated by using a tool called Peer Review, which is an added extension to the clicker-style assessment functionality in the Discovery Teaching application. Discovery Teaching is a web application with several tools designed to support interactive and evidence-based teaching and learning in the higher education classroom. There is a growing body of evidence that students can deepen their understanding and mastery of complex skills and concepts by reviewing each other's work. Many of the modern pedagogical innovations are based on peer review. Think-Pair-Share directs students to find their own solution to a problem and then to discuss it in a small group where they receive feedback on their attempt and work to form a collaborative solution based on those insights. There are many other pedagogies that also rely on some sort of peer review, e.g. Pair Programming, POGIL, JigSaw, Calibrated Peer Review, Recursive Pedagogy, Teacher's Dilemma, GroupWork, etc. The experience and impact assessment of peer review reported in this paper is based on data collected from two Computer Science courses during the spring 2019 semester where the Peer Review functionality was used. In our data analysis we looked for the impact of using peer review by looking for correlations between overall students peer grading on specific answers and the instructor’s grading. This would inform whether peer review summaries are good proxies for instructor or teaching assistant’s review of students’ responses. We also looked at how often each student graded or agreed with the majority of the classroom. In addition, we also looked to see whether students’ accuracy or performance in peer reviewing correlates with overall course performance. Our overall experience and results demonstrate that this type of peer review activity increases all students’ immersion and quality of engagement with the assessment materials, crowd-sources reliable grading information reflecting students learning, and leads to overall better learning outcomes for the students.

Keywords:

Peer review, peer grading, formative assessment, active learning, interactive teaching, educational technology, technology-supported pedagogy.