A Comparison of Peer Rating Behavior Between Students in Hard vs. Soft Disciplines

This Work in Progress research focuses on the peer ratings behavior of students in liberal arts and business, versus engineering or the sciences and is relevant wherever teams are used as part of the pedagogy, We examine whether there are differences in patterns of peer rating behavior due to differences in their particular learning experiences and learning style preferences, as measured by their patterns in evaluations in peer ratings surveys. Our hypothesis is that engineering students (“hard discipline students”) will have significant differences in the patterns of peer evaluation scores as opposed to liberal arts or business students (“soft discipline students”). This analysis will use convergence in self and peer ratings, dispersion in ratings across peer evaluation dimensions, and the variances examined in the Social Relations Model as statistical analysis methods.The goals of this research are to discover if peer ratings patterns are significantly influenced by learning styles or learning preferences. And, if peer ratings behavior is influenced by learning styles or preferences then we plan to aid instructors in managing learning for doing/receiving peer ratings and improving teamwork behavior for students taking their courses based on their students' differences in learning styles/preferences. Our preliminary findings confirm our hypothesis that such peer ratings behavior differences exist.