Incorporating peer review techniques to enhance students' communication skills and team performance in engineering capstone projects

Research output: Contribution to journalSystematic reviewpeer-review

4 Scopus citations

Abstract

This paper will describe the educational experiences gained by the authors by adding peer review activities to the Capstone Design courses in the Electrical Engineering (EE) program at Georgia Southern University. In particular, the authors have incorporated three peer-focused activities in each of the two EE program capstone design courses (Senior Project I and II), where a peer review assessment is used as a communication enhancement tool. The peer review activities and their corresponding assessment tools have been designed with the main objective to help student to enhance their written and oral communication skills, as well as their leadership and teamwork skills. The activities in which peer review has been added are writing assignments, oral presentations, and team member performance evaluations. Also, to help in the peer review process the instructors introduced the help of a Student Writing Fellow (SWF); this is a student with outstanding written and oral communication skills who was trained to perform the peer review process. The role of the SWF was to provide support to the instructors, to ensure that students gain some benefits from the peer review process without increasing the workload on the faculty teaching the course, and to provide an individual with whom students feel more comfortable interacting. This paper describes the process and the rubrics used to perform the peer review assessment in the different activities. Results from surveys showed an increase in student awareness about the importance of seeking feedback from others when working on important written documents. Results of the peer evaluation of oral presentations provided the most benefits because by the end of the semester, students showed improvement in their presentation skills: they were more confident, came better prepared, interacted more with the audience, and kept track of the time. This improvement was reflected in the rubric scores trends during the two semesters. Results on the assessment of team members' effectiveness helped the instructors to identify in a timely manner conflicting issues in some of the teams. The overall experience of the instructors adding the peer review was very positive and of benefit to the students.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1969-1982
Number of pages14
JournalInternational Journal of Engineering Education
Volume35
Issue number6B
StatePublished - 2019

Keywords

  • Assessment
  • Capstone design
  • Peer review
  • Teamwork

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