A systematic review of educational online peer-review and assessment systems: charting the landscape

Over the past two decades, there has been an explosion of innovation in software tools that encapsulate and expand the capabilities of the widely used student peer assessment. While the affordances and pedagogical impacts of traditional in-person, “paper-and-pencil” peer assessment have been studied extensively and are relatively well understood, computerized (online) peer assessment introduced not only shifts in scalability and efficiency, but also entirely new capabilities and forms of social learning interactions, instructor leverage, and distributed cognition, that still need to be researched and systematized. Despite the ample research on traditional peer assessment and evidence of its efficacy, common vocabulary and shared understanding of online peer-assessment system design, including the variety of methods, techniques, and implementations, is still missing. We present key findings of a comprehensive survey based on a systematic research framework for examining and generalizing affordances and constraints of online peer-assessment systems. This framework (a) provides a foundation of a design-science metatheory of online peer assessment, (b) helps structure the discussion of user needs and design options, and (c) informs educators and system design practitioners. We identified two major themes in existing and potential research—orientation towards scaffolded learning vs. exploratory learning and system maturity. We also outlined an agenda for future studies.