- There is evidence that low stakes scaffolded writing and peer review assignments made student understanding of disciplinary practices easier (Woods, Safronova, & Adler Kassner 2021)
- Results suggest that positive effect of structured peer review assignments is an example of how students can gain disciplinary expertise which influences a student's performance on the final paper
- The importance of this project is to understand what improves the process of learning. In this study, we are looking at the relationship between the content of each review and the results in students grades when implementing student peer reviews in a college course
- Compared two categories in particular: reviews that mentioned error only, and reviews that mentioned error and suggested how to improve to see if the suggested improvement was related to an increase in the student’s final exam score.
- Performed a t-test (See table to the right) to compare the final exam score means
- As portrayed, the students that left feedback highlighting the error and suggested improvements did better on the final exam than their peers that left feedback only highlighting the error (t = -2.59, p<.05**)
- Also performed a correlation analysis on both categories with the final exam scores
- Students who left reviews that mentioned error only did not show a significant correlation (r= 0.04, p= 0.55) with their exam scores
- Students who left reviews that mentioned error and how to improve had a significant positive correlation (r=0.26, p<.00**)
**Significance Level = 0.05
- The process we went through to explore the dataset we had was coding each review comment given by the students under different categories that helped identify each comment’s attributes
- There were eighteen categories, each exploring different aspects of the review
- Some of the categories explore what the tone of the review is, some are related to logistics about the comment, and there are others related to the direction the comment is trying to influence the writer in
The Effects of Peer Review in the Classroom
Waseem Alsayed - UMICH
(PI) Maggie Safronova - UCSB
(PI) Vanessa Woods - UCSB
(Partner) Logan Geivet - UCSB
- The conclusion we came to in this study was that the effect of students leaving reviews that pointed out the errors and how to improve had a positive impact on student’s grades
- Specifically, the correlation between those who left comments pointing out the errors and how to improve and their final exam score was 0.2584
- Future directions and potential questions to be answered could be answered by exploring the correlation between some of the other categories and the students’ final exam grades, such as the tone and praise categories
I’d like to acknowledge my two supervisors, Maggie and Vanessa, along with my scholar mentor, Sabrina, and partner, Logan for the time and dedication that was spent exploring this study, along with the rest of Seismic for this wonderful opportunity!
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS & CITATIONS
For more information, visit https://www.seismicproject.org/working-groups/experiments/access-to-practice-project/