Effectiveness of class peer-review under varied multiple review designs: A teaching method with homeschooling format

In times of pandemic-related university shutdowns and a shift of teaching to homeschooling, alternative educational methods are more in demand than ever. The class peer-review (CPR) method offers the opportunity for students to evaluate each other and share knowledge during their private learning time. This study reports on a CPR which was conducted out-of-class with 39 students in Business Management. Participants were asked to write an essay about a case on Marketing and then conduct two reviews. Subsequently, the difference between reviews in the same topic of the own manuscript or in two different exam-relevant subjects was investigated and the effect on exam performance and participants’ attitude was measured. The results showed that the final grades after CPR with thematically similar reviews were on average better than those of the comparison group. This was due to the fact that the reviews were more critical and technically more profound and generated a greater amount of knowledge among the authors. Carrying out several reviews in other subject areas led to a higher self-assessment of knowledge uptake, but was too superficial for the exam. If the learning objective is more of a narrowly defined and in-depth topic area, a CPR out-of-class with two to three reviews in the manuscript's own topic is recommended, in order to generate the highest possible level of knowledge for others as well as for oneself.