Automatic Analysis of Peer Feedback using Machine Learning and Explainable Artificial Intelligence

Sammanfattning: Peer assessment is a process where learners evaluate and provide feedback on one another’s performance, which is critical to the student learning process. Earlier research has shown that it can improve student learning outcomes in various settings, including the setting of engineering education, in which collaborative teaching and learning activities are common. Peer assessment activities in computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) settings are becoming more and more common. When using digital technologies for performing these activities, much student data (e.g., peer feedback text entries) is generated automatically. These large data sets can be analyzed (through e.g., computational methods) and further used to improve our understanding of how students regulate their learning in CSCL settings in order to improve their conditions for learning by for example, providing in-time feedback. Yet there is currently a need to automatise the coding process of these large volumes of student text data since it is a very time- and resource consuming task. In this regard, the recent development in machine learning could prove beneficial. To understand how we can harness the affordances of machine learning technologies to classify student text data, this thesis examines the application of five models on a data set containing peer feedback from 231 students in the settings of a large technical university course. The models used to evaluate on the dataset are: the traditional models Multi Layer Perceptron (MLP), Decision Tree and the transformers-based models BERT, RoBERTa and DistilBERT. To evaluate each model’s performance, Cohen’s κ, accuracy, and F1-score were used as metrics. Preprocessing of the data was done by removing stopwords; then it was examined whether removing them improved the performance of the models. The results showed that preprocessing on the dataset only made the Decision Tree increase in performance while it decreased on all other models. RoBERTa was the model with the best performance on the dataset on all metrics used. Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) was used on RoBERTa as it was the best performing model and it was found that the words considered as stopwords made a difference in the prediction.