How Continuous Peer Review Improves Student Learning: Case Study

Study Reveals Impact of Repeated Peer Review on Student Learning

The 2020 study, Using Continuous Peer Evaluation in Team-based Engineering Capstone Projects: A Case Study, details the impact of doing continuous, weekly peer evaluation in groupwork or team-based courses. Feedback Loop client Auburn University’s Ginn College of Engineering also does peer feedback weekly, based on this study, and has found the continuous peer feedback practice helpful for team development.

This study demonstrated student grades improved simply from the act of a weekly peer review exercise. The authors present a method using weekly peer review to calculate a participation factor that scales the team grade based on individual performance. The goal of this method is to adjust individual student effort to match group expectations, rewarding high-performing students and penalizing free riders. Continuous peer feedback also promotes professional communication with the ongoing giving and receiving of critical feedback. While the study only tracked engineering capstone courses, we see no reason why these findings would not apply to all other team-work based courses.

This continuous peer review study provides examples of how Performance Factor is calculated to identify individual performance within a team and shows a modest correlation between performance factor and individuals’ assignment grades and overall GPA. It also presents longitudinal insight with performance factor statistics over multiple semesters. Student feedback on this process of continual, weekly peer feedback shows a perceived efficacy in addressing teamwork challenges.

Five Actionable Takeaways from This Study

1. Issue peer evaluations often, up to weekly. Not every instructor has the bandwidth to conduct peer review weekly, but conducting it as often as is reasonable will provide a better teamwork experience than doing it the common cadence of one to two times per term.
2. Calculate a score relative to students’ teams. EduSourced, our sister product for capstone management, calls this a Relative Performance Score (RPS) and this scoring method is coming soon to Feedback Loop. RPS uses peer review scores for each student and compares them to their teammates to identify individual student performance relative to their team. Students who perform above average can be given additional points and students who perform below average can be penalized.
3. Promote professional communication and critical feedback. This helps with higher-order skills and prepares students for the workplace.
4. Address barriers to effective peer evaluation by recognizing that students can have concerns openly discussing feedback with their team. Conducting anonymous peer review helps and educating students on how to give and receive feedback can help further.
5. Continually monitor the peer evaluation process and be open to improvements based on student feedback. This may involve refining the structure of team meetings, shortening peer review survey length to maintain student focus, etc.