Score-Group Framing Negatively Impacts Peer Evaluations

How does group membership framing affect the feedback students provide learners? This paper presents two between-subjects experiments that investigate the effect of Ingroup/Outgroup membership on effort spent in peer evaluations, and whether the group membership criterion affects quality and stringency of evaluation. Two peer-review assignments were implemented in two separate classes. In the first study, students were nominally grouped by location they sat in class and non-nominally grouped by current class score; each was asked to review an Ingroup and Outgroup peer assignment. A second study randomly assigned students to one of four group types (random, score, motivation, and location); students reviewed two Ingroup assignments. In both studies, score-grouped students graded their peers more stringently than students grouped by location. These studies illustrate for system designers the impacts of group framing – and the disclosure of that—in peer review tasks.