Impact of Collaborative Team Peer Review on the Quality of Feedback in Engineering Design Projects.

Increasing classroom sizes and decreasing financial and human resources have encouraged educators to seek innovative strategies to manage large classrooms. Several instructors have begun using web-based peer reviews as a way to increase open-ended feedback. Recent work in design-based classes has revealed that students struggle to provide meaningful peer feedback. Furthermore, it remains unclear how best to increase student motivation and engagement with the process. In a sophomore mechanical engineering class, we investigated the effect of a collaborative team of reviewers (a team of reviewers generating a single review) on the quality of feedback generated and on student perception of the process. Feedback generated by 117 students on their peers' design projects over two assignments was analyzed using a mixedmethods approach. We found that collaborative team of reviewers produced higher quality feedback than did individual reviewers. Students spent more time on reviews in teams but found the process engaging and more fun than with individual reviews. Furthermore, students perceived individual and team review tasks as requiring similar levels of effort. Our findings indicate that team review approach could help reviewers provide better feedback in engineering design reviews. Additionally, collaboration improved student engagement in the process. Over the past two decades, peer reviews have remained a solitary endeavor--this study is the first group process implementation of peer review and provides a basis for future exploration of the topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]