Design and Evaluation of an IT-based Peer Assessment to Increase Learner Performance in Large-Scale Lectures

In this study, we propose an IT-based peer assessment (ITPA) for enhancing interaction and feedback in universities’ large-scale lectures. These lectures often lack interaction and feedback, and focus on mainly imparting factual knowledge. Hence, these formats often cannot go beyond the basic cognitive levels of educational objectives. Using the ITPA within the learning process helps integrating assignments focusing on high cognitive levels to comprehensively acquire the learning content. We follow a design science research approach to develop and evaluate the ITPA. Thus, we first identify requirements from theory and derive a set of design elements afterwards. A pre-test shows that the ITPA is seen as useful and learners intend to use it. The subsequent quasiexperiment in a large-scale lecture shows that learners who participated in the ITPA performed better in the part of the final exam trained by the ITPA, whereas they did not perform better in the others parts.