Unfolding the network of peer grades: a latent variable approach

Peer grading is an educational system in which students assess each other's work. It is commonly applied under Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) and offline classroom settings. With this system, instructors receive a reduced grading workload, and students enhance their understanding of course materials by grading others' work. Peer grading data have a complex dependence structure, for which all the peer grades may be dependent. This complex dependence structure is due to a network structure of peer grading, where each student can be viewed as a vertex of the network, and each peer grade serves as an edge connecting one student as a grader to another student as an examinee. This article introduces a latent variable model framework for analyzing peer grading data and develops a fully Bayesian procedure for its statistical inference. This framework has several advantages. First, when aggregating multiple peer grades, the average score and other simple summary statistics fail to account for grader effects and, thus, can be biased. The proposed approach produces more accurate model parameter estimates and, therefore, more accurate aggregated grades by modeling the heterogeneous grading behavior with latent variables. Second, the proposed method provides a way to assess each student's performance as a grader, which may be used to identify a pool of reliable graders or generate feedback to help students improve their grading. Third, our model may further provide insights into the peer grading system by answering questions such as whether a student who performs better in coursework also tends to be a more reliable grader. Finally, thanks to the Bayesian approach, uncertainty quantification is straightforward when inferring the student-specific latent variables as well as the structural parameters of the model. The proposed method is applied to two real-world datasets.