2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In an increasingly collaborative and globalized world, effective teamwork is an essential skill for engineers. To help students develop teamwork skills, project-based learning (PBL) courses, including first-year cornerstones, have become a component of most engineering programs. However, having students work in teams on an engineering project does not necessarily ensure effective teamwork is practiced or that students further develop their teamwork skills. Peer evaluation systems, such as CATME, have been developed to help assess teamwork skills and provide feedback to team members. Formative feedback from peers can encourage effective team behaviors and decrease social loafing.
While CATME evaluations collect both quantitative ranking and qualitative comments, qualitative peer comments often lack objective, helpful feedback due to several potential biases. To combat these biases, it has become clear that intentional instruction on how to give feedback is essential. Previous literature shows an improvement in the quality of both quantitative CATME ratings and qualitative comments after students received feedback training. Informed by positive results of previous interventions and our own challenges with low-quality written feedback, we explored the implementation of a feedback intervention for first-year engineering students in a first-year PBL course. We created a 30-minute, interactive presentation that covered common pitfalls of peer feedback, qualities of constructive feedback, and examples of helpful and unhelpful feedback. Our intervention was presented to six classes of first-year engineering students at a large public university in the American Southeast.
This paper seeks to describe the development of the in-class intervention, observations from implementation, and a preliminary investigation of the impact of intervention on peer feedback quality. To assess the effectiveness of the intervention in improving feedback quality, student feedback comments from two classes in Fall 2023 are quantitatively compared to comments from the same course and instructor in Fall 2022. The class feedback comments are compared on total length as well as count of the type of comments, in line with Hattie and Timperley’s framework of feedback. Hattie and Timperley (2007) identified four levels of feedback: task, process, self-regulation, and self. The intervention was designed to increase the number of process and self-regulation comments. From preliminary analysis, we expect that the in-class intervention increased the overall length of peer comments and increased the number of constructive process or self-regulation level comments. Findings from this study include implications for methods of implementing peer feedback in PBL courses, increased focus on qualitative CATME comments, and further investigation of formative peer feedback in first-year engineering courses.