Assessing Student Perceptions of Peer Review Methods' Efficacy in a Team-Based, Senior Undergraduate Capstone Course Setting

Within Penn State, the Aerospace Engineering department has historically used the Comprehensive Assessment of Team Member Effectiveness (CATME) online tool hosted by Purdue University to conduct its peer reviews within four of its capstone courses, which are yearlong offerings running fall to spring. While the tool is research-backed and widely used within capstone courses across the country, recent feedback at Penn State has revealed a perception among students that the tool's “five teamwork dimensions” are overly complex, unclear, and do not allow students to accurately represent true team dynamics and individual behaviors when using the tool to generate peer review scores. In response to this feedback, the Aerospace Engineering capstone course instructors have developed a new peer review method called Participation and Professional Engineering Skills Assessments (PEPSA), which combines a Participation Factor (PF) approach with a simplified, custom peer review survey generated in Qualtrics that uses a Likert scale and measures the degree to which students agree or disagree with statements related to each team member's performance and professional skills demonstration. This paper describes both the new peer review tool as well as results from a study conducted in the 2022/2023 academic year to evaluate student perceptions of PEPSA against the prior CATME baseline using two identical study questionnaires.