Supervising Faculty: Chris Schunn
Contact: Chris Schunn, schunn@pitt.edu
Area of Research: Cognition, Educational Psychology, Peer Feedback
Description of Research: To get students more engaged, many classes at Pitt (and around the world) use online peer feedback, connected to papers, presentations, and projects. Research has shown that this helps student learning. But research also shows the learning benefits are uneven: it seems to depend upon the situation, and we don't yet know much about this "it depends". We have an interdisciplinary project that is trying to figure it out. As a next stage in our project, we'll be looking carefully at the feedback that was produced in two different situations: situations where the feedback is associated with a lot of learning (effective feedback), and situations where the feedback is associated with very little learning (ineffective feedback). We have some hypotheses about how they will differ, and we need a team of researchers who will work together to see which ones are right, or maybe discover new hypotheses about what is going on. You can see some prior related projects here: https://www.lrdc.pitt.edu/schunn/webpeers.html
Duties of Students: The detailed work is to systematically go through the feedback (as a team) and "code it" for different features/characteristics of each feedback comment. Then we will do some statistical analyses.
Requirements: No prior research experience is required. Just bring some interest and curiosity about how people learn. We will teach you all you need to know about research in education and psychology.
Terms offered: Fall 2025, Spring 2026
Number of Students: 3
Application: If you would like to apply, just email Chris Schunn at schunn@pitt.edu.