Organizing Peer Correction in Tertiary STEM Education: An Approach and its Evaluation

Abstract

This article reports on a novel higher-education course format exploiting choreographed peer reviews and self-corrections using an online learning platform. The novel course format aims to reduce teachers' workload as it was motivated by the necessity to run examinations for all courses during all terms, even though almost all courses can only be offered every second term. As a consequence, and because of a very high students-to-teacher ratio, many students have to prepare for examinations without sufficient assistance. This article describes the novel course format and reports on its evaluation in a case study. The evaluation indicates that most students benefit from the novel course format but that it is less efficient than traditional formats based on a higher teachers' involvement. The major weakness of the novel format is the insufficient participation of some students to their peer-reviewing. The article suggests and discusses possible measures to address that weakness. This article extends previous work by the same authors by providing an extended evaluation of the students' attitudes towards the course format, their behavior on the platform and their peer reviews. The course format and the learning platform are described in greater detail and the integration into related work has been expanded.