JISC

Overview

Higher education teachers acquire complex assessment skills by making numerous evaluative judgements about students’ assignments each year and by constructing personalized feedback on those assignments. If we want students to develop critical thinking and autonomy in assignment production they should be provided with high-level evaluative experiences similar to those of teachers. Peer review, students evaluating and commenting on each other’s work, is the means to achieve this.

Peer review is however time-intensive and difficult to implement when student numbers are large.

This project focuses on technology-supported peer review: it will highlight its untapped potential, showcase good practice and provide guidelines for implementation.

Aims and objectives 

The aims of the PEER project are to identify educational designs and evaluate software tools that support student peer-review processes, and to pilot peer review in different disciplines.

The objectives are to:

• Review the literature and identify the educational features of effective peer review.
• Map available software systems that support peer review to the educational features.
• Pilot and evaluate peer review using software in academic departments at the University of Strathclyde
• Produce guidelines for effective implementation of peer review using software with large student numbers.
• Provide evidence-based information for others wishing to implement peer review.

Project methodology

The PEER project has three phases. The first will involve the development of a framework and the identification of a set of educational designs for peer review as well as a mapping and evaluation of existing software systems that support peer review. The second phase will be a pilot implementation and evaluation of peer review in at least two different disciplinary areas. The third phase will involve the production of outputs, in particular, guidelines on how to implement peer review using software and a literature review. Other outputs will be produced and disseminated through the website, events and project reports.

Anticipated outputs and outcomes

The outputs of the PEER project include:

• A website documenting project progress
• Educational designs for peer review
• Analysis of technologies available for peer review
• Guidelines on how to implement peer review
• Evaluation of pilot implementations including description of lessons learned
• Papers in peer reviewed journals and reports.

The project will also:

• Raise awareness and improve understanding of the educational benefits of peer review
• Provide a framework for current and future implementations of technology-supported peer review
• Provide an overview of the state-of-play of software tools for peer review
• Scope future work required