Research has established the value of student peer reviewing; however, students appear to seldom have the time or belief to make best use of the practice. An automated peer review system is therefore useful and necessary, as it provides students with limitless assessment and assistance.
Auto-Peer is a free, 24/7-available computational peer review tool. Auto-Peer uses a combination of basic and sophisticated approaches to 1) guide students towards improved writing skills through analysis and feedback; and 2) allow instructors insight into student misconceptions.
Auto-Peer identifies a wide range of student-writing issues, requiring students to either
1) modify their text, and/or
2) justify their writing choices.
Following the Auto-Peer checks, instructors receive all student-generated responses to the automated review.
Auto-Peer is an important development because it provides students with on-demand peer reviewing that aims to improve writing excellence; it allows instructors to reallocate assessment time for providing interventions on more nuanced aspects of the paper; and it presents researchers with opportunities for conducting a wide array of studies on peer reviewing methods, approaches, and techniques.
Auto-Peer is being developed by faculty, researchers, and graduate students at the American University of Sharjah in Sharjah, UAE.
Peer feedback that works
“User-friendly”
Auto-Peer helped me correct mistakes that would cost me a lot of marks. It is also a straightforward software that is user-friendly and provides reasoning for mistakes. I will definitely be using Auto Peer with all my other courses.
“New perspectives”
… Auto-Peer helped me to get another perspective on my writing, something which I lack when I myself am the only one reading the draft multiple times.
“Exceptional”
After continuous use of Auto-Peer, I began to adjust my writing based on the explanations, and I noticed a decrease in the number of issues detected. Additionally, I like that Auto-Peer does not correct students’ papers. Instead, it allows students to assess their written texts.
Auto-Peer is an exceptional program that every student is recommended to use to assess their papers.
“Easy and helpful”
This application has made it much easier to peer review our work rather than trying to communicate to other student who I barely know.
[T]his application is really helpful and I can see myself using it in the future other than for the writing course.
“Here for the explanations”
It is very helpful when it comes to grammatical/structural/vocabulary issues that cannot be highlighted by the standard suite of software provided by word. I especially liked how easy it is to use and download. Additionally, the built-in explanations are probably the only reason why I kept using it over and over.
I will definitely use Auto-Peer for my future assignments.