How Competent are Freshman Engineering Students in Constructively Rating Their Peers in a Team Context?

• Published in: Association for Engineering Education - Engineering Library Division Papers
• Main Authors: Benjamin Emery Mertz, Ferguson, Daniel M, Hoque, Mohd Iramul
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: Atlanta American Society for Engineering Education-ASEE 23.06.2018
• Subjects: Engineering; Engineering education; Feedback; Intervention; Peers; Performance evaluation; Ratings; Ratings & rankings; Students; Teamwork; Training

In this evidence-based practice paper, we will be investigating how well freshman engineering students are able to constructively rate their peers in a team context and interventions that may help them improve their rating abilities. Teamwork is a skill that has been integrated into many different courses in a variety of different academic disciplines in response to the demand for these skills in industry. One way to improve teamwork is through peer evaluation of an individual’s contribution to the team’s work. This feedback allows students to improve their own performance while providing them with an opportunity to practice an important professional skill. This feedback is also importance to promoting positive team behaviors and creating better team experiences. A web-based tool called CATME (Comprehensive Assessment of Team Member Effectiveness) was used to assist students in giving feedback to their teammates in a first-year Introduction to Engineering Course during the Fall 2017 semester. Four sections (of approximately 40 students) were uses at the intervention group and 3 sections were used as the control group. In this study, the students were given the opportunity to do three peer evaluations of their teammates throughout the semester. A control group was asked to complete the evaluations without any additional rater training. The intervention group was provided two different interventive trainings. Frame of reference (FOR) training was provided before the first peer evaluation at the beginning of the semester to orient the students in the intervention group to the dimensions of teamwork that the CATME model uses to evaluate teamwork performance. The FOR training also instructed students on the rating scale that they were to use during their ratings. The second intervention occurred before the second peer evaluation was a rater error training (RET). In the RET, the consequences of different negative rating patterns were discussed and the importance of giving good ratings was re-emphasized. There was not intervention performed before the final peer evaluation in order to evaluate the longevity (if any) of the effects of the trainings. This paper is meant to address how much freshman engineering students’ peer evaluation ratings of themselves and their teammates vary. We then want to evaluate how specific interventions change the rating patterns of students in their peer evaluations. The results will be compared to the results from peer institutions found in literature as well as extend to studying the cumulative effect of using multiple different kinds of interventions throughout the semester.