Peerwise Study for Assessment of Higher Order Thinking in Students

This study investigates the impact of PeerWise software system (Denny et al., 2008) as an instructional strategy to increase the quality of student's ability to construct a multiple-choice question (MCQ's) that tests Higher-Order Thinking (HOT). Today's education system goes beyond recalling and understanding facts, and assessing learning outcomes. Promoting students' HOT skills should be considered as an important educational goal. According to Bloom’s (1956) taxonomy, HOT is about engaging students at the highest levels of thinking to foster stimulating learning environments where students become creators of new ideas, analyzers of problems, generators, and evaluators of knowledge.PeerWiseis a web-based system that supports the creation of MCQ’s by students, allowing them to provide an explanation for their question. It enables students to answer questions generated by other students, and helps them evaluate the quality of each question using a HOT rubric. We conducted statistical analysis on the number of questions created by students, number of questions answered,numberof substantial comments, and average question rating. Additionally, students were given a pretest and posttest before and after the use ofPeerwiseto assess the improvement in HOT skills. We test the benefits of providing PeerWise support and conclude that PeerWise works efficiently to improve HOT skills in students.