Gamification of student peer review in education: A systematic literature review

Abstract

We present the first systematic review of the use of gamification in educational peer review activities. The goal of this work is to understand how gamification has been used to engage students in peer review activities and to summarize the empirical evidence for its effectiveness. Our main contribution is the presentation of a general model of the peer review process that captures the students’ activities and an examination of the specific actions within this model that have been gamified in the current literature. We also summarize the commonly used game mechanics and the context and year level of courses in which prior research has been conducted, along with the reported effects on student behavior. We find that artifact assessment and artifact creation are the two most commonly gamified actions with respect to our peer review model and that the quantity and quality of both the artifacts and the generated feedback are the most popular reward criteria. In addition, Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) are the discipline areas in which gamified peer review activities are most often reported. In general, while the existing peer review literature reports mostly positive effects of gamification on student engagement, the range of student actions which have been incentivized remains narrow. Key activities, such as student reflection on the feedback received, have been largely unexplored with respect to gamification and thus present useful avenues for future work.