An Online Progressive Peer Assessment Approach to Project-Based Learning: A Constructivist Perspective

How to improve students' problem-solving skills and creativity and adapt them to the new situation of the twenty-first century is a rather important educational objective at present, and is expected to be for a long time to come. Project-based learning (PBL) is considered to be an approach that can develop students' higher-order thinking skills, while peer assessment is a strategy that helps students to interact and reflect. To improve the quality of peer assessment in PBL and to further promote learning by using the feedback of peer assessment, this study proposes an online progressive peer assessment (OPPA)-based PBL approach using constructivism as the theoretical framework for instructional design. The aim of the proposed approach is to organise progressive peer-assessment activities for students as they complete the project, thereby promoting high-quality peer evaluations and continuous reflective improvement of the project. To test the effect of the OPPA-based PBL approach, a quasi-experiment was carried out in an educational game development course with 49 university students from two classes. Students in the experimental group used the OPPA-based PBL approach to develop their game projects, while students in the control group used the conventional PBL approach to develop their game projects. The findings show that the OPPA-based PBL approach significantly improved students' learning achievement, self-efficacy, collective efficacy, problem-solving, and creativity awareness, while also reducing their anxiety levels compared to the conventional PBL approach. The results of this study provide a reference for improving project-based learning, and further demonstrate the importance and validity of constructivist learning theory.