TY - JOUR
T1 - Peerwise provides significant academic benefits to biological science students across diverse learning tasks, but with minimal instructor intervention
T2 - Diverse Learning Benefits of PeerWise for Biology Students
AU - McQueen, Heather A
AU - Shields, Cathy
AU - Finnegan, D. J.
AU - Higham, J
AU - Simmen, M W
PY - 2014/9/10
Y1 - 2014/9/10
N2 - We demonstrate that student engagement with PeerWise, an online tool that allows students to author and answer multiple‐choice questions (MCQs), is associated with enhanced academic performance across diverse assessment types on a second year Genetics course. Benefits were consistent over three course deliveries, with differential benefits bestowed on groups of different prior ability. A rating scheme, to assess the educational quality of students' questions, is presented and demonstrates that our students are able intuitively to make such quality assessments, and that the process of authoring high quality questions alone does not explain the academic benefits. We further test the benefits of providing additional PeerWise support and conclude that PeerWise works efficiently with minimal intervention, and can be reliably assessed using automatically generated PeerWise scores.
AB - We demonstrate that student engagement with PeerWise, an online tool that allows students to author and answer multiple‐choice questions (MCQs), is associated with enhanced academic performance across diverse assessment types on a second year Genetics course. Benefits were consistent over three course deliveries, with differential benefits bestowed on groups of different prior ability. A rating scheme, to assess the educational quality of students' questions, is presented and demonstrates that our students are able intuitively to make such quality assessments, and that the process of authoring high quality questions alone does not explain the academic benefits. We further test the benefits of providing additional PeerWise support and conclude that PeerWise works efficiently with minimal intervention, and can be reliably assessed using automatically generated PeerWise scores.
UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/bmb.20806
U2 - 10.1002/bmb.20806
DO - 10.1002/bmb.20806
M3 - Article
SN - 1470-8175
VL - 42
SP - 371
EP - 381
JO - Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education
JF - Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education
IS - 5
ER -