A guide for students
Welcome to PeerWise!
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This guide provides an overview of the main features of PeerWise, to help
you get underway.
If you have never used PeerWise before The first thing you will need to do is create an account. Just click the "Registration" link on the log-in page:  Log in using the account you previously created. If you have a new course to join, just click "Join course" on the Home menu. |
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Find out about...
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| Main menu | Answering questions | Writing your own questions | Reviewing your answers | Agreeing / disagreeing with comments | Following authors | Personal tags | Leaderboards | Scoring | Badges |
Main menu
After logging in and selecting your course, you will be shown the Main menu for that course. The "Main menu" is divided into the following areas:
Answering questions
You might like to start by answering a few of the questions that have already been contributed by other students. You can select a question to answer from the "Unanswered questions" table:
Once you have answered a question, you will be given feedback on the response you selected, and you will be shown an explanation of the answer. You will then be given an opportunity to select the difficulty level you think best matches the question and to give the question a rating, which you should think about very carefully.
When rating a question, you should be judging two things:
- whether you think the question is of a high enough quality that it could appear in the final exam
- whether you think the explanation provided with the question is sufficient so that if someone answered the question incorrectly the explanation would help them to understand what they have done wrong
Other things to keep in mind:
- you should not rate questions differently based on their difficulty an easy question is just as useful and just as likely to appear in the exam as a hard question
- be fair with your ratings you should justify a poor rating with a comment to the author of the question, or by agreement with a previously written comment
- make sure any comments you provide are constructive you are rating questions written by your peers so provide the kind of feedback that you would find useful and encouraging yourself
- to encourage everyone to participate equally, all activity on PeerWise is anonymous (however your instructor is able to track contributions)
Writing your own questions
Once you have answered a few questions, you may feel ready to contribute a new question of your own. There are several parts to the question writing process:
Provide the question text
- make sure the question is very clear, and not likely to be ambiguous
- use professional language, and avoid slang or spelling mistakes
Provide the alternatives
- you can have up to four
- all distracters should be plausible
- ideally, each distracter should correspond to a misconception that other students may have regarding the question
Indicate the correct answer
- there must be only one
Provide an explanation
- this is very important, and will serve to help anyone who answers the question incorrectly to understand what they have done wrong
- the quality of your explanation is one of the criteria for how your question will be rated
- you might like to provide an explanation corresponding to each one of the distracters for your question
Associate "topics" or "tags"
- you may "tag" your question with certain topics to which it relates. You can either select from a list of current topics, or you can add new topics of your own
- this may help others to locate questions of interest
When you create a question, there are some basic formatting options available to you:
You can view the questions that you have contributed in the "Your questions" table:
The "Your answer popular?" column indicates whether or not the answer you suggested was correct is the most popular one selected by your peers. Until there have been a certain number of responses to your question, the symbol shown in this column will be three dots (...).
Reviewing your answers
At any stage, you can review the questions you have answered in the "Answered questions" table.
The symbols in the "Your result" column have the following meanings:
| Your selected alternative matches the one the author of the question suggested was correct, and is also the most popular alternative selected. Particularly if the question is highly rated, it is very likely that this is indeed the correct answer to the question. |
| Your selected alternative matches the one the author of the question suggested was correct, but it is not the most popular alternative selected |
| Your selected alternative does not match the one the author of the question suggested was correct, however it is the most popular alternative selected |
| Your selected alternative matches the one the author of the question suggested was correct, however there have not yet been enough responses to accurately determine which is the most popular alternative |
| Your selected alternative does not match the one the author of the question suggested was correct, however there have not yet been enough responses to accurately determine which is the most popular alternative |
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| Your selected alternative does not match the one the author of the question suggested was correct, which is also the most popular alternative selected. Particularly if the question is highly rated, it is very likely that you have answered this question incorrectly. |
| The alternative you selected, the alternative the author suggested was correct, and the most popular alternative are all different. It is very likely that there is a problem with this question. |
Agreeing / disagreeing with comments
You may choose to either agree or disagree with any comments previously written about a question. To agree with a comment, select the star in the "Agree with comment" column, and to disagree with a comment, select the cross in the "Disagree with comment" column.
The level of agreement with the comments determines the order in which they are displayed.
Following authors
If there are many students contributing to PeerWise, there may be a large number of questions available for you to answer. One way to discover good questions is to identify question authors that are writing good quality questions. If you find a question that you particularly like, the author of that question may have also contributed other good questions. You can choose to follow an author at any time, and this will give you access to all of the questions written by that author.
To follow an author, simply click on the "Follow" button when viewing the details of a question in the "Answered questions" section.
Once you have chosen to follow an author, all of their questions that you have not yet answered will appear in the "Followed questions" section.
Personal tags
You can assign your own personal tags to any questions that you have answered. Personal tags are not visible to anyone else, but may help you later to locate certain questions again.
To add a personal tag to a question, simply write the tag in the text box and click the "Add tag" button.
A list of the personal tags you have assigned to your answered questions will be displayed on the "Answered questions" page. Selecting a tag from this list will display only those questions to which you have assigned that tag.
You can remove all of the personal tags you have assigned to a question by clicking the "Remove all tags" button.
Leaderboards
You can also browse the leaderboard, which includes tables such as the top rated questions, the most popular contributors and the highest scorers.
Scoring
You will notice that a score is displayed in the top right hand corner of the Main Menu:
Your total score is composed of individual scores for question writing, answering questions and rating existing questions. To increase your total score, you should try to achieve good scores for each component. To do this, you should:
- write relevant, high-quality questions with well thought out alternatives and clear explanations
- answer questions thoughtfully
- rate questions fairly and leave constructive feedback
- use PeerWise early as the score increases over time based on your contribution history
Badges
As you participate and contribute to PeerWise, you can earn a variety of badges. Whenever you earn a new badge, you will see a notification appear on the main menu as shown below:
To view the badges you have currently earned, you can select "View my badges" from the options on the main menu:
