Alice
Gao
David
R.
Cheriton
School
of
Computer
Science
How do we provide sufficient and high-quality feedback to students on their assignment solutions with limited course staff? How do we expose students to different approaches to solving a problem and common mistakes and misconceptions? How do we motivate students to evaluate their assignments solutions using the marking schemes critically?
Peer review can help address all of these challenges. In this talk, I will introduce a basic peer-review system and discuss concerns of using such a system in a class.
In a peer-review system, students first submit their assignment solutions. Then, they are assigned to review multiple other students' submissions anonymously based on a detailed marking scheme. In the end, each student receives a mark and various feedbacks for their submission.
The usefulness of a peer-review system critically depends on the quality of the peer reviews. I will discuss various strategies to motivate students to produce high-quality reviews. To highlight a few ideas, we could evaluate the quality of a student's review by comparing it to other students' reviews of the same submission. The TAs could determine the qualities of reviews by marking some of them. Furthermore, we could monitor the review competency of each student and assign them reviews accordingly.
I am also interested in gathering your perception of peer-review systems concerning two questions.
- Will your students benefit from performing peer reviews? Why or why not?
- What are your main concerns about using a peer-review system in your class?
This talk is based on Mechanical TA, a peer-review system I've been working on, as well as other peer-review systems discussed in the education literature.