Peer review procedures in higher education applied to engineering studies

The peer review procedure is based on a mutual exchange process of giving and receiving feedback from people with similar competences. Set in the context of higher education, it is a specific form of peer learning, where the solution proposal of an exercise and the feedback comes from students attending the same course. Using the peer review process, individual feedback for all students can be generated, even for large courses, under reasonable effort for the teachers. It enables students to reflect on their own solutions and share their knowledge, which is mutually beneficial. A challenge when applying the technique to new courses or study fields lies in developing suitable tasks. It should be possible to cope with the assessment of the tasks at a satisfying quality level and in reasonable time, providing beneficial learning effects to both the reviewer and the reviewee. In this contribution, we revisited the technique with the aim to provide new ideas for applications in civil engineering education and to improve existing ones. We applied three different types of tasks and evaluation schemes to a peer review procedure in the context of a fundamental undergraduate course with about 500 attendees. We statistically evaluated the exam results and observed an upward deviation in the grades of the participants in the peer review procedure. Additionally, we determined the acceptance amongst the participants using a questionnaire. Based on our experiences, we make proposals for using peer review procedures in engineering education.