title: PeerWise provides significant academic benefits to biological science students across diverse learning tasks, but with minimal instructor intervention.
abstract: We demonstrate that student engagement with PeerWise, an online tool that allows students to author and answer multiple-choice questions (MCQs), is associated with enhanced academic performance across diverse assessment types on a second year Genetics course. Benefits were consistent over three course deliveries, with differential benefits bestowed on groups of different prior ability. A rating scheme, to assess the educational quality of students' questions, is presented and demonstrates that our students are able intuitively to make such quality assessments, and that the process of authoring high quality questions alone does not explain the academic benefits. We further test the benefits of providing additional PeerWise support and conclude that PeerWise works efficiently with minimal intervention, and can be reliably assessed using automatically generated PeerWise scores.
authors: Institute of cell Biology, School of Biological Sciences, University of Edinburgh, King's Buildings, Mayfield Road, Edinburgh, EH9 3JR, United Kingdom.
authors: H A
authors: HA
authors: McQueen
authors: C
authors: C
authors: Shields
authors: D J
authors: DJ
authors: Finnegan
authors: J
authors: J
authors: Higham
authors: M W
authors: MW
authors: Simmen
mesh_terms: D001690:Biological Science Disciplines / Q000193:education*; D004521:Educational Measurement / Q000379:methods*; D005823:Genetics / Q000193:education; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D007858:Learning; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D013334:Students; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D013663:Teaching / Q000379:methods*; D014495:Universities
keywords: PeerWise; collaborative learning; participatory; peer learning