This paper has been written as a pre-study of how students at a master level in industrial design and packaging logistics will perceive an assignment about peer tutoring knowledge from scientific journal articles and popular science literature. The study is being performed by teachers in the Packaging Logistics, MTTN35 course and the Industrial Design Project I, IDEN05 at the Faculty of Engineering, Lund University. Both courses are focused on projects that the students work on, either individually or in smaller groups and the literature assignment are one of several assignments in both courses. There has been an observation by the teachers in both courses that many of their students prefer more hands-on practical assignments and the students seems to be unused to the format of literature studies; how to present knowledge from literature and how to use it in their projects. The reason for introducing peer tutoring for the literature assignment in both courses has been an intention by the teachers to make the students more interested in literature studies and to give them a deeper understanding for the relevance of using scientific literature in their work. The intention of using peer-tutoring in smaller groups or pairs, in comparison to individual literature reading, is to give the students an opportunity to discuss and help each other to use literature as a source of information and inspiration for their projects. Hence the underlying teaching and learning question for this paper and the coming study has been: How do students perceive the use of peertutoring of science literature as a part of project based learning? This study will be followed up by an evaluation of the peer tutored assignment after the courses has been completed. The authors of this paper have used literature as inspiration for how to design the task and how to evaluate the result. The literature study has also given an insight in what advantages and disadvantages could be expected.
