Peer Teaching in Tertiary STEM Education: A Case Study

This article reports on a novel higher-education course format exploiting choreographed peer reviews and self corrections so as to reduce to a minimum the teachers' involvement. The novel course format was motivated by the necessity to run examinations for all courses during all terms, even though almost all courses are offered only every second term. As a consequence and because of a very high students to teacher ratio, many students have to prepare for examinations without sufficient assistance. This article describes the novel course format and reports on its evaluation in a case study. The evaluation indicates that most students benefit from the novel course format but that it is less efficient than traditional formats based on a much higher teachers' involvement. The major weakness of the novel format is an insufficient dedication of some students to their reviewing. The article suggests and discusses possible measures to address that weakness.