Through the Looking Glass: Insights into Visualization Pedagogy through Sentiment Analysis of Peer Review Text
This work addresses the problem of improving visualization pedagogy for educators by offering data-driven insights, though it is incremental as it applies existing sentiment analysis methods to a new educational context.
The study tackled the lack of empirical measurement of peer review in visualization courses by analyzing student projects and peer review text via sentiment analysis across two courses at the University of South Florida, providing insights such as course content focus and student engagement.
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.