Resumen de Incorporating peer review techniques to enhance students’ communication skills and team performance in engineering capstone projects
Rocio Alba Flores, Fernando Rios
This paper will describe the educational experiences gained by the authors by adding peer review activities to the Capstone Designcourses in the Electrical Engineering (EE) program at Georgia Southern University. In particular, the authors have incorporatedthree peer-focused activities in each of the two EE program capstone design courses (Senior Project I and II), where a peer reviewassessment is used as a communication enhancement tool. The peer review activities and their corresponding assessment tools havebeen designed with the main objective to help student to enhance their written and oral communication skills, as well as theirleadership and teamwork skills. The activities in which peer review has been added are writing assignments, oral presentations, andteam member performance evaluations. Also, to help in the peer review process the instructors introduced the help of a StudentWriting Fellow (SWF); this is a student with outstanding written and oral communication skills who was trained to perform thepeer review process. The role of the SWF was to provide support to the instructors, to ensure that students gain some benefitsfrom the peer review process without increasing the workload on the faculty teaching the course, and to provide an individual withwhom students feel more comfortable interacting. This paper describes the process and the rubrics used to perform the peer reviewassessment in the different activities. Results from surveys showed an increase in student awareness about the importance ofseeking feedback from others when working on important written documents. Results of the peer evaluation of oral presentationsprovided the most benefits because by the end of the semester, students showed improvement in their presentation skills: they weremore confident, came better prepared, interacted more with the audience, and kept track of the time. This improvement wasreflected in the rubric scores trends during the two semesters. Results on the assessment of team members’ effectiveness helped theinstructors to identify in a timely manner conflicting issues in some of the teams. The overall experience of the instructors addingthe peer review was very positive and of benefit to the students
