Engaging students in the peer review process has been recognized as a valuable educational tool. It not only nurtures a collaborative learning environment where reviewees receive timely and rich feedback but also enhances the reviewer’s critical thinking skills and encourages reflective self-evaluation. However, a common concern arises when students encounter misaligned or conflicting feedback. Not only can such feedback confuse students; but it can also make it difficult for the instructor to rely on the reviews when assigning a score to the work. Addressing this pressing issue, our paper introduces an innovative, AI-assisted approach that is designed to detect and highlight disagreements within formative feedback. We’ve harnessed extensive data from 170 students, analyzing 15,500 instances of peer feedback from a software development course. By utilizing clustering techniques coupled with sophisticated natural language processing (NLP) models, we transform feedback into distinct feature vectors to pinpoint disagreements. The findings from our study underscore the effectiveness of our approach in enhancing text representations to significantly boost the capability of clustering algorithms in discerning disagreements in feedback. These insights bear implications for educators and software development courses, offering a promising route to streamline and refine the peer review process for the betterment of student learning outcomes.

This paper describes the development of AIDA, the Ancient Inscription Database and Analytics system. The AIDA system currently stores three types of ancient Minoan inscriptions: Linear A, Cretan Hieroglyph and Phaistos Disk inscriptions. In addition, AIDA provides candidate syllabic values and translations of Minoan words and inscriptions into English. The AIDA system allows the users to change these candidate phonetic assignments to the Linear A, Cretan Hieroglyph and Phaistos symbols. Hence the AIDA system provides for various scholars not only a convenient online resource to browse Minoan inscriptions but also provides an analysis tool to explore various options of phonetic assignments and their implications. Such explorations can aid in the decipherment of Minoan inscriptions.