Promoting students' creative self-efficacy, critical thinking and learning performance: An online interactive peer assessment approach guided by constructivist theory in maker activities

Abstract

Peer assessment is acknowledged as a potent strategy that motivates students to engage in reflection and comparison through the evaluation of their peers' work. However, the effectiveness of peer assessment is not always satisfactory due to a number of factors, such as lack of in-depth understanding of peers' work and insufficient motivation for the behavior of evaluation. Based on constructivist theory, this study proposed an Understanding-Evaluation-Backward Evaluation-Reflection based peer assessment (UEBR-PA) approach, which directs students to comprehensively grasp their peers' projects, undertake efficient evaluations, provide retrospective reviews on others' feedback, and ultimately, integrate this collective feedback to refine and enhance their own projects. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, a quasi-experiment was conducted in an Open-Source Hardware Project Design course with 54 university students from two classes. One class was assigned as the experimental group to conduct the peer assessment using the proposed approach, while the other class was assigned as the control group to conduct the peer assessment using the conventional presentation-evaluation-communication based approach. The results of the study indicated that the UEBR-PA approach significantly increased students' creative self-efficacy, critical thinking tendency, and learning performance. Furthermore, students engaging with the UEBR-PA approach showcased more positive interactive assessment behaviors.