Dr Paul Denny
Associate Professor
School of Computer Science
The University of Auckland
New Zealand
PeerWise is an award-winning, free web-based tool that instructors can use to support collaborative student learning across a wide range of disciplines. PeerWise presents students with a repository of multiple-choice questions and provides instant feedback in response to student answers. Each question has an associated discussion thread in which students can debate their answers and explain their understanding of the related concepts. All of the questions in the repository are authored by students, as authoring assessment questions has been shown to be an effective learning activity. To create a relevant question and to explain the answer to that question in their own words, a student must effectively process and organise course material, and a growing body of evidence supports the inclusion of student authored questions in the learning process.
Researchers around the world are using PeerWise data to better understand how student-generated resources can aid learning. An up to date list of these publications is available.
PeerWise received the QS Reimagine Education Overall Award, as well as the Gold Award in the ICT Tools for Learning and Teaching category, in 2019 - awards contested by 1184 projects from 39 countries.
PeerWise is used in a wide variety of subjects, and students often exhibit tremendous creativity in the content they publish. View a set of example questions generated by students from several subjects.
If you are interested in citing PeerWise in your own work, the following are the original publications describing the approach:
- Paul Denny, Andrew Luxton-Reilly, and John Hamer. 2008. The PeerWise System of Student Contributed Assessment Questions. In Proceedings of the Tenth Conference on Australasian Computing Education - Volume 78 (ACE '08). Australian Computer Society, Inc., AUS, pages 69–74.
- Paul Denny, John Hamer, Andrew Luxton-Reilly, and Helen Purchase. 2008. PeerWise: Students Sharing their Multiple Choice Questions. In Proceedings of the Fourth international Workshop on Computing Education Research (ICER '08). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, pages 51–58. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/1404520.1404526