1. Background
Tutorials are important teaching and learning tools designed to enhance understanding of the disciplinary content covered in lecturers [
1]. Tutorials create an active and interactive learning environment, and are considered an important platform for providing both academic and personal support [
1,
2]. As opposed to the didactic nature of lectures and other forms of instruction, tutorials are support systems where students engage with specific learning materials, and provide opportunities for students to express own points of view and interact and relate with tutors and other students through discussion and problem-solving [
1,
2]. Despite the widely documented benefits of tutorials as instructional tools in engineering education, the impact on students learning is continuously being questioned. In essence, the success of tutorials as learning tools largely depend on the students’ preparedness in, and commitment to, the tutorial sessions [
1,
3]. Students’ participation also plays a critical role in the success of tutorials as supplemental tools for guided learning [
1]. The under preparedness of students, and the poor attendances during tutorials, are some of the factors that often militate against the effectiveness of tutorials to students learning.
Inasmuch as the conventional tutorial strategies may still be relevant and effective, contestations exist around their efficacy in large number of students. In South Africa, in particular, large student enrolments are typical in most public universities. The declining faculty-student ratios are, thus, proving to be a challenge in the deployment tutorials as effective teaching and learning strategies. In order to circumvent some of these challenges, this paper proposes a tutorial-based assessment strategy that leverages on reciprocal peer assessment in tutorial practice questions. The paper explores reciprocal peer tutorial assessment (RPTA) as an innovative strategy to enhance students’ disciplinary understanding and engagement in a capstone course in Process Metallurgy.
6. Discussion
Based on a two-stage reciprocal peer evaluation in tutorial tests, this study explored opportunities collaborative learning in order to enhance students’ disciplinary learning and engagement in a capstone course in Process Metallurgy. Tutorial-based assessments are an important platform for providing both academic and personal support [
2,
7]. Previous studies clearly attest the importance of reciprocal peer tutoring and its variants to be vital tools in reflective and self-directed learning by students, providing feedback, and in identifying strengths and weaknesses in students’ learning [
5,
7,
10,
11,
12,
14,
16,
18].
Based on students’ responses, the opportunity for intellectual debate and experiencing different perspectives to problem solving by peers was rated to have positively impacted on the understanding of disciplinary concepts. This is because some students understood the concepts better when they were explained in simple terms by their peers. In fact, several studies affirm that the students who studied with reciprocal peer tutoring demonstrated a better disciplinary understanding of the material tested [
5,
14,
15,
17]. Since the facilitator’s role was reduced to only to umpiring, the timely feedback from peers also significantly reduced the pressure of dealing with large tutorial cohorts [
11,
12].
Furthermore, the importance of prior understanding of the disciplinary concepts forms the key precept for students to fully benefit in RPTA [
5]. This realization, complemented with positive effects of RPTA on incentivising the students to prepare beforehand, provides synergistic benefits for self-directed learning. Thus, reciprocal peer tutorial assessments provide a good and effective way to force students to engage with disciplinary concepts and prepare beforehand, as well as helping them to identify their competencies and weaknesses [
5,
7,
9,
12].
An in-depth analysis of open-ended responses revealed that reciprocal peer assessment in tutorial tasks enhanced healthy competition among students. The beneficial effects of healthy competition on students learning has been widely explored in game-based learning [
23,
24]. These studies proposed that competition is vital to student learning by providing additional challenges and motivation, as well as opportunities for active participation in the learning process. Thus, in this case, RPTA can act as a motivational trigger that can stimulate students’ engagement and persistence in the learning activities. In other words, when in a healthy competition with others, students tend to work harder and, invariably, improving their knowledge in the process [
24].
Nevertheless, competition among students can also have unintended negative impacts on disciplinary learning and students’ engagement [
23,
24,
25]. Some of the respondents noted the RPTA provided opportunities for peers to cheat and award each other marks. Since the RPTA contributed 20% to the year mark for the course, competition linked to external rewards in the form of year marks can invariably lower the students’ sense of control, leading to reduced intrinsic motivation [
25]. Clearly, some respondents cited that the RPTA exercise was too much work for them, time consuming and boring, and explicitly cited expressed explicit preference to replace the tutorial tests with a take home assessment task. Furthermore, the anxiety over year marks highlighted by students can also have significant implications on the apparent surface and superficial learning strategies adopted by some of the students [
20,
22,
27,
28,
29,
30,
31,
32]. As opposed to deep learning approaches where a student engages meaningfully with disciplinary content, there was tendency towards surface learning approaches associated with memorization without any meaningful engagement with the concepts involved [
20,
22,
27,
28,
29,
30,
31,
32]. Although not validated by findings from the present study, the negative perceptions and preferences to RPTA could have significantly precipitated the undesirable learning strategies adopted by some of the students.
The findings highlighted discomfort by students in assessing their peers whom they perceived to be more knowledgeable than them. In fact, some students cited that they felt incompetent and were embarrassed from their poor performance during the tutorial assessments. Thus, such students may be discouraged by the perceived persistent underperformance against their peers [
21,
23,
24,
34,
35,
36,
37]. This sense of social comparison can, in fact, negatively affect the students’ self-efficacy, thereby undermining performance [
21,
23,
24,
34,
35,
36,
37]. Self-efficacy, defined as the personal belief that an individual has the means and capabilities to attain prescribed learning goals, is a key component to self-regulated learning [
34,
35,
36,
37]. Inasmuch as students with high self-efficacy tend to be motivated to take up more challenges and control of their own learning, those with low efficacy are most likely to get frustrated, give up, and or/or engage in unethical behaviour to boost their year marks [
34,
35,
36,
37].
Furthermore, the reciprocity of learning among peers forms the fundamental tenet of collaborative learning in the current RPTA strategy. Based on findings from a study evaluating the students’ attitudes towards reciprocal peer tutoring, helpful group members, opportunities to work in groups, feedback from groups, comfort from peer interaction, and the opportunities to share knowledge were some of the obvious benefits of reciprocal peer tutoring [
16]. Other scholars proposed that the success of reciprocal peer tutoring lied in the social and cognitive congruence between the peers [
17,
38]. Thus, for RPTA to be successful, it has to be based on a high level of mutual assistance, mutual trust, social acceptance and positive reinforcement among the students.
It is also clear that the benefits of the RPTA strategy in the present study could have been negated by the low levels of trust among peers. For example, some students explicitly stated that they doubted their peers’ level of disciplinary knowledge, and felt that they were marked down due to assessor’s lack of knowledge. These challenges are congruent to findings in previous studies [
12,
19,
20,
26,
39,
40]. In particular, the findings from previous studies clearly highlighted the students’ doubt in the reliability, validity and objectivity of peer assessments, and that the students preferences to learn from an expert academic rather than from inexperienced peers [
12,
19,
20,
26,
39,
40]. An earlier study by Gray [
12] also concluded that students tended to be hard on their colleagues, seemed to be reluctant to award marks for other than obviously correct answers, and struggled to comprehend poorly expressed answers. However, despite these challenges, RPTA provided the students with opportunities to understand the expectations of the assessments in the course under study.