Designing For Engagement: A Comparison Of Canvas And A Visual Peer Review Dashboard

Peer review is an underutilized yet potentially powerful strategy for fostering evaluative judgment and design literacy in visualization education. Critiquing visual work requires domain-specific competencies that extend beyond generic peer feedback; however, widely adopted platforms such as Canvas provide limited support for the cognitive and visual demands of visualization critique. We introduce VisPeerReview, a visualization-specific learning analytics dashboard (LAD) designed to scaffold peer feedback through an integrated visualization display, rubric-guided prompts, and inline annotation tools. We evaluated VisPeerReview through a three-phase mixed-methods study conducted in an undergraduate data visualization course, comparing it with Canvas’s default peer-review workflow. Drawing on interaction logs, peer-review text, and survey responses, we found that VisPeerReview elicited significantly longer and more linguistically rich feedback and was consistently preferred by students. Sentiment analysis further indicated more positive evaluative language and clearer reviewer intent under the dashboard-supported condition. Beyond tool evaluation, this study offers the first systematic comparison between Canvas and a visualization-specific LAD, demonstrating how theory-aligned instructional interface design—grounded in representational competence and learningsciences frameworks—can meaningfully improve the quality of peer feedback in computing education.

Alon Friedman, Ly Dinh, Md Dilshadur Rahman, and Paul Rosen. Designing For Engagement: A Comparison Of Canvas And A Visual Peer Review Dashboard. ACM Transactions on Computing Education, 2026.

@article{friedman2026designing,
  title = {Designing for Engagement: A Comparison of Canvas and a Visual Peer Review
    Dashboard},
  author = {Friedman, Alon and Dinh, Ly and Rahman, Md Dilshadur and Rosen, Paul},
  journal = {ACM Transactions on Computing Education},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Peer review is an underutilized yet potentially powerful strategy for
    fostering evaluative judgment and design literacy in visualization education. Critiquing
    visual work requires domain-specific competencies that extend beyond generic peer
    feedback; however, widely adopted platforms such as Canvas provide limited support for
    the cognitive and visual demands of visualization critique. We introduce VisPeerReview,
    a visualization-specific learning analytics dashboard (LAD) designed to scaffold peer
    feedback through an integrated visualization display, rubric-guided prompts, and inline
    annotation tools. We evaluated VisPeerReview through a three-phase mixed-methods study
    conducted in an undergraduate data visualization course, comparing it with Canvas’s
    default peer-review workflow. Drawing on interaction logs, peer-review text, and survey
    responses, we found that VisPeerReview elicited significantly longer and more
    linguistically rich feedback and was consistently preferred by students. Sentiment
    analysis further indicated more positive evaluative language and clearer reviewer intent
    under the dashboard-supported condition. Beyond tool evaluation, this study offers the
    first systematic comparison between Canvas and a visualization-specific LAD,
    demonstrating how theory-aligned instructional interface design—grounded in
    representational competence and learningsciences frameworks—can meaningfully improve the
    quality of peer feedback in computing education.}
}