The multiple faces of peer review in higher education. Five learning scenarios developed for digital business

Abstract

Peer review, as an e-assessment tool incorporates the human factor to treat complexity for rating and grading students. It could address the qualitative more than quantitative aspects with flexible human feedback that leads up to metacognitive knowledge aspects, which e-assessment usually is not able to achieve. Peer review is an internationally well-known method for quality assurance in science; it is now used for teaching and assessment in universities. This paper presents an analysis of five teaching scenarios that use peer review. All scenarios have been working with the same technical setting within different courses in Digital Business and included 765 participants. Regarding e-peer review qualitative and quantitative data from 298 students were collected. The tasks in the different learning scenarios differ between well-structured to complex and cognitively ambitious assignments like academic paper writing. Further analysis of criteria like lead time, support expense, dimension of cognitive processes, meeting of professional standards and social interaction shows how the five scenarios lead to either better or less efficient learning performances