Student attitudes and motivation for peer review in CS2

Computer science students need experience with essential concepts and professional activities. Peer review is one way to meet these goals. In this work, we examine the students' attitudes towards and engagement in the peer review process, in early, object-oriented, computer science courses. To do this, we used peer review exercises in two CS2 classes at neighboring universities over the course of a semester. Using three groups (one reviewing their peers, one reviewing the instructor, and one completing small design or coding exercises), we measured the students' attitudes, their perceptions of their abilities, and how many of the reviews they completed. We found moderately positive attitudes that generally increased over time but were not significantly different between groups. We also saw a lower completion rate for students reviewing peers than for the other groups. The students' internal motivation, as measured by their need for cognition, was not shown to be strongly related to their attitudes nor to the number of assignments completed. Overall, our results show a strong need for external motivation to help engage students in peer reviews.