Toward a Novel Tool for Continuous Peer Evaluation of Group Projects
Abstract
Many university courses are designed with group projects to provide students with “real-world” work experiences to better prepare them for their future careers. However, working in groups is not always a rewarding learning experience for students, as a variety of collaboration problems may arise when the students work together. Peer evaluation has been used as an approach to deal with these potential collaboration issues and has shown promise. At the same time, current peer evaluation approaches exhibit some serious shortcomings, including an increased workload for students and instructors, a tendency to give everyone high scores, and an inhibition to provide meaningful feedback from which group members can learn and improve how they engage. In this thesis, we introduce Daily Smirk, a novel peer evaluation tool that addresses these shortcomings. The tool supports a lightweight, high-frequency peer evaluation approach that aims to reduce students’ workload, provide useful insights for instructors to monitor ongoing teamwork, and reset expectations for using peer evaluation. We briefly review the state-of-the-art in peer evaluation, introduce key goals for Daily Smirk, and present its high-level design decisions and evaluation plan.