Peerwise provides significant academic benefits to biological science students across diverse learning tasks, but with minimal instructor intervention: Diverse Learning Benefits of PeerWise for Biology Students

Heather A McQueen, Cathy Shields, D. J. Finnegan, J Higham, M W Simmen

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

33 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)371-381
Number of pages11
JournalBiochemistry and Molecular Biology Education
Volume42
Issue number5
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 10 Sept 2014

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