Dr. Alon Friedman has been awarded a U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to put towards his project . This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
Peer Reviews, in which students have the opportunity to analyze and evaluate projects made by their classroom peers, are a widely acknowledged pedagogical method for engaging students and have become a standard practice in undergraduate education. Peer review is most often used in classes with large number of students to provide timely feedback on student assignments. However, peer review has benefits far beyond scalability. Peer review gathers diverse feedback, raises students鈥� comfort level with having their work evaluated in a professional setting, and most importantly, the action of giving a peer review is often more valuable than receiving a peer review. This project plans to develop and study an innovative peer review system that uses behavioral nudges, a method of subtlety reinforcing positive habits, to improve the evaluation skills of students and the quality of the feedback they provide in peer reviews.