Exploring the Impact of Online Peer Assessment on Critical Thinking in Student Teachers: Insights from an Epistemic Network Analysis

Peer has increasingly become one of the important teaching evaluation tools in higher education in China, and a large number of existing studies have shown that peer-assessment not only promotes learners’ deeper understanding of knowledge to enhance learning effectiveness, but also enhances students’ critical thinking. Therefore, exploring the cyclical characteristics of critical thinking and the change process of internal dimensions is still an important research topic at present. In this study, with the help of an online learning platform, Xiaoya, we collected text data of comments from 67 students in online discussions, analyzed the time-series characteristics of students’ critical thinking in an eight-week course based on a critical thinking coding framework, and used epistemic network analysis (ENA) to compare different genders, main posts and replies’ epistemic network characteristics. It was found that (1) students showed positive critical thinking trends in the discussions; (2) male student teachers’ epistemic abilities were at the middle to upper level; (3) the discussions in the main post covered a wide range of topics and established connections between Applicating solutions and Recognizing problems, while some critical thinking dimensions in the replies were missing. Furthermore, by analyzing the stages of students’ critical thinking, this study provides teachers and learning designers with suggestions for students to conduct peer assessment in order to help students better understand the learning content.