# SmartGroup: A Tool for Small-Group Learning Activities
## 2 Related Work
### Peer Assessment  
Our approach to reducing instructor burdens in the adoption of SGLAs and collaborative learning relies upon utilizing students and self-guided learning and instructional resources through group work and peer evaluation. Peer assessment can have positive effects on student attitudes and outcomes which are as good as or better than instructor assessments [41], but the major strength of peer assessment is that it allows students to receive quality and timely feedback regarding projects in a manageable way for lecturers [42]. Such feedback is often available in greater volumes, and because of potentially greater amounts of time, peer assessors of lesser assessment skills are still capable of producing feedback on par with instructors [43]; student peer assessment feedback can more closely approximate instructor feedback if students are aware of clearly defined assessment criteria [44]. Although researchers have thought that student involvement (e.g., devising the scheme for intervention and training in its use) is necessary for students to benefit, students feel that they benefit from peer assessment interventions even without said involvement [45]. These benefits come from both the student's roles as an assessor and as an assessee [46]. We note that the benefits of peer assessment complement the benefits of SGLAs in higher education.  
Technologically facilitated peer assessment is a promising avenue for supporting peer assessment in group work; peer evaluators in such technologically assisted systems still receive benefits from both their roles as an assessor and an assessee [46]. For example, the peer assessment platform PeerStudio uses technology to facilitate rapid rubric-based feedback for individuals' works and offers students grades based on statistical manipulations of peer reviews; this platform demonstrates that students in large classrooms (i.e., both online and in-person) can benefit from such systems in the form of improved outcomes [47]. Prior research by [PERSON] et al. shows that peer feedback in such online classrooms that utilize rubric-based assessment correlates highly with staff-determined grading [48]; however, such use of rubrics in peer evaluations creates significant time burdens on students, which is why hybrid grading approaches (i.e., machine grading/algorithmic scoring in conjunction with peer rubric-based evaluations) might be favorable [49]. Such hybrid grading systems also allow instructors to offer students questions with free responses, instead of just multiple choice questions [50]. In addition, researchers have developed tools intended for the evaluation of peers' contributions within group projects such as CATME [51]. CATME (i.e., Comprehensive Assessment of Team Member Effectiveness) is a prominent tool that offers both peer evaluation and group formation capabilities [52], making it similar to our SmartGroup system.  
SmartGroup is designed based upon this rich foundation of peer assessment research, but it differs from available tools in the following key ways: (1) peer evaluations are for group work as opposed to individuals' work (e.g., as opposed to PeerStudio [47]) or individuals' contributions (e.g., as opposed to CATME [51]); (2) grades are to be determined entirely by peer reviews based on instructor-provided rubrics (i.e., as opposed to machine grading [47]); (3) if students feel that their group's grade and the peer reviewer's written rationale for said grade are unfair, SmartGroup offers students a novel approach for disputing a grade through an appeal process. The dearth of research specifically regarding technologically assisted peer evaluations for group outcomes is a significant gap in the literature which we hope this work can begin to fill.