abstract
- Peer review as an active teaching strategy has been employed for multiple purposes. In the case of the intervention reported here, the objective was to determine the degree of improvement in compliance with terms of reference in research pre-proposals submitted by graduate-level students in a general course on Sustainable Development in engineering and sciences when a peer evaluation digital tool and an a priori feedback process is incorporated. As a control group, the evidence of the students registered in the spring semester of 2023 was taken, while the experimental group consisted of the evidence of the students registered in the fall of 2023. Students in the control group obtained an average score of 26.46¿±¿4.06 points out of 40, while students in the experimental group obtained an average score of 35.09¿±¿4.76. Using a single-tailed Mann-Whitney U test (with a significance level of 0.05), it was obtained that the experimental group obtained a higher total mean than the control group (p-value¿<¿0.0001). A Principal Component Analysis showed that about 80% of the variance in the experimental group was explained by three principal components, while four were required for the control group. This could indicate a greater homogeneity in the evaluations obtained concerning the criteria evaluated in the experimental group. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2025.