The Impact of Ranking Information on Students' Behavior and Performance in Peer Review Settings.

The paper explores the potential of usage and ranking information in increasing student engagement in a double-blinded peer review setting, where students are allowed to select freely which/how many peer works to review. The study employed 56 volunteering sophomore students majoring in Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering. We performed a controlled experiment, grouping students into 3 study conditions: control, usage data, usage and ranking data. Students in the control condition did not receive additional information. Students in the next two conditions were able to see their usage data (logins, peer work viewed/reviewed, etc.), while students in the last group could additionally see their ranking in their group according to their usage data. Results showed that while the three groups were comparable, a range of different attitudes were visible in the Ranking group. Students with more positive attitude towards ranking were more engaged and outperformed their fellow students in their group.