Abstract:
Increasingly, educators are using peer review as a pedagogical tool to engage students in higher education. Studies of the effectiveness of student peer review have found that thinking critically about the work of peers improves student learning (Mulder et al. 2013). Separately, while visual literacy communication courses, in which educators teach effective visualization practices, are gaining in popularity, few options exist to measure student engagement with the course material. Recently, however, Friedman and Rosen (2017) developed a student peer review model of visual assessment to provide insight into student engagement in this area. In this study, we build upon that work using sentiment-based methods to analyze student peer review comments and relate elements of the text to assignment and final project grades. As part of this effort, we developed a new data dictionary to support natural language processing in visual literacy in the liberal arts. The results of the textual analysis show that students who received high grade scores from the instructor used nouns extensively. However, further examination revealed that the correlation between grades and speech was moderate (R = 0.3). Future studies should examine whether behavioral nudges may promote more complete sentences by students performing peer review.
Hawley, K., & Friedman, A. (2023, July). Visual Peer Review: Examining Students’ Parts of Speech Comments vs. Grade. In EdMedia+ Innovate Learning (pp. 168-175). Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE).