Zachariah Beasley

Zachariah Beasley, Alon Friedman, Paul Rosen

Peer review is a widely utilized feedback mechanism for engaging students. As a pedagogical method, it has been shown to improve educational outcomes, but we have found limited empirical measurement of peer review in visualization courses. In addition to increasing engagement, peer review provides diverse feedback and reinforces recently-learned course concepts through critical evaluation of others' work. We discuss the construction and application of peer review in two visualization courses from different colleges at the University of South Florida. We then analyze student projects and peer review text via sentiment analysis to infer insights for visualization educators, including the focus of course content, engagement across student groups, student mastery of concepts, course trends over time, and expert intervention effectiveness. Finally, we provide suggestions for adapting peer review to other visualization courses to engage students and increase instructor understanding of the peer review process.

Zachariah J. Beasley, Les A. Piegl, Paul Rosen

Accurately grading open-ended assignments in large or massive open online courses (MOOCs) is non-trivial. Peer review is a promising solution but can be unreliable due to few reviewers and an unevaluated review form. To date, no work has 1) leveraged sentiment analysis in the peer-review process to inform or validate grades or 2) utilized aspect extraction to craft a review form from what students actually communicated. Our work utilizes, rather than discards, student data from review form comments to deliver better information to the instructor. In this work, we detail the process by which we create our domain-dependent lexicon and aspect-informed review form as well as our entire sentiment analysis algorithm which provides a fine-grained sentiment score from text alone. We end by analyzing validity and discussing conclusions from our corpus of over 6800 peer reviews from nine courses to understand the viability of sentiment in the classroom for increasing the information from and reliability of grading open-ended assignments in large courses.