ACM Journal of Educational Resources in Computing, Vol. 3, No. 1, March 2003, Article 3. WebCoM: A TOOL TO USE PEER REVIEW TO IMPROVE STUDENT INTERACTION ELAINE SILVA AND DILVAN MOREIRA University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil ________________________________________________________________________ The peer review, known by almost everyone in the academic world, is proposed as a method for computer science classes to improve interaction among student groups. By this method, groups of students publish their assignments over the Internet using the WebCoM tool developed to support this activity. A group of fellow students reviews their work and publishes their findings (in the Internet) also using the WebCoM tool. Finally, the two groups debate their points of view in front of the class (in traditional courses) or in a chat room (in distance education courses). Debate and competition between the groups provide a chance for the students to learn more about each other’s work. They also gain an opportunity to learn how to give and receive criticisms in a constructive way. This should increase the students' ability to interact and work in groups: an important skill for computer science professionals. We show how the method is applied and how it is supported by WebCoM. In addition, results from past course experiences are presented to help evaluate the method and the tool. Categories and Subject Descriptors: H.5.0 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: General; K.3.0 [Computers and Education]: General General Terms: Design, Experimentation, Human Factors, Management Additional Key Words and Phrases: Peer review, Internet tools, teaching methods. _______________________________________________________________________ 1. INTRODUCTION In the last few years, education has gone through an important change: the introduction of information technology in the educational process. Many efforts have been made in education to realize the benefits of technologies like the Internet, resulting in the numerous tools available today to produce multimedia educational material for the Web (for instance: WebCT [WebCT 2003]; Blackboard [Blackboard 2003]; TopClass [TopClass 2003], etc.). However, teachers are not yet completely sure how to use these tools to create new and effective models for teaching over the Internet. In addition to publicizing instructional materials, schedulers, and communication mechanisms (such as chat rooms or discussion groups), what more does Internet technology offer teachers and students? One possible answer is using Internet services to increase the interactivity level among students. There are many ways to do so, but this article presents a method, based on experiences with student groups and peer review, and a tool, WebCoM (Web Course Manager), to help teachers apply this method. The second author has been using Internet technology to teach a variety of computer science classes since 1996; and since 1997 has been using and refining a teaching method __________________________________________________________________________________________ This research was in part supported by CAPES and FAPESP-Brazil. Authors' addresses: SCE-ICMC-USP, Av. do Trabalhador São-Carlense, 400, Centro, Cx. Postal 668, Sao Carlos-SP, Brazil. Emails: dilvan@computer.org and elaine@icmc.usp.br. Permission to make digital/hard copy of part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that the copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, the copyright notice, the title of the publication, and its date of appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the ACM, Inc. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. © 2001 ACM 1073-0516/01/0300-ART03 $5.00