Study by Magda Donia Among the Most Read in the Academy of Management Learning & Education

An article co-authored by professor Magda Donia which showed an improvement in students’ peer-evaluation skills over time was among the top 20 most-read articles in the journal Academy of Management Learning & Education in January. In this article, Magda Donia in collaboration with Stéphane Brutus of Concordia University described how the repeated experience of evaluating peers in undergraduate classes resulted in students becoming more confident and skilled in the task of evaluating others. A matched group quasi-experimental design was used in which 182 students evaluated their learning group members in three different semesters, and a control group (three matched groups of 182 students each) evaluated their team members only once.

The results indicated students can become more confident and effective peer evaluators through repeated use of a standardized peer-evaluation system. These findings demonstrate the added value of incorporating standardized evaluations into business school group work as a means of generating skills relevant to managerial practice. The researchers are now starting to collect followup data for what they hope will be a study that shows these effects persist into the workplace.

Magda Donia is an assistant professor human resource management and organizational behaviour at the Telfer School of Management. An abstract of the research is available at this link.