Student-Led Peer Review: A Practical Guide to Implementation Across Disciplines and Modalities

by Summer Ray Clark, Liv Cummins, Lisa Spitz, Bill Porter, Kimberly A. Lowe

Overview

Student-led peer review can be a powerful learning experience for both giver and receiver, developing evaluative judgment, critical thinking, and collaborative skills that are highly transferable across disciplines and professions. Its success depends on purposeful planning and scaffolding to promote student ownership of the process. With intentional and consistent implementation, peer review can engage students in course content and promote deep learning, while also increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of faculty assessment.

Based on the authors’ extensive experience and research, this book provides a practical introduction to the key principles, steps, and strategies to implement student peer review – sometimes referred to as “peer critique” or “workshopping”. It addresses common challenges that faculty and students encounter. The authors offer an easy-to-follow and rigorously tested three-part protocol to use before, during, and after a peer review session, and advice on adapting each step to individual courses.

The process is applicable across all disciplines, content types, and modalities, face-to-face and online, synchronous and asynchronous. Instructors can guide students in peer review in one course, across two or more courses that are team-taught, or across programs or curriculums. When instructors, students, and university stakeholders create a culture of peer review, it enhances learning benefits for students and allows faculty to share pedagogical resources.

Student peer review is a high-impact pedagogy that’s easily implemented, inculcates lifelong learning skills in students, and relieves the assessment burden on faculty as students collaborate to improve their own work.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781642673111
Publisher:	Stylus Publishing
Publication date:	10/11/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	152
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Summer Clark is a specialist in literacy education and fostering equity in the classroom with a Ph.D. from University of Maryland, College Park. Ignited by her K-12 teaching experiences in Mississippi, Atlanta, Morocco, and Washington, DC, she is committed to teacher education for social justice. Her recent publications focus on critical literacy, student agency, and children’s literature. A member of the peer review research team since 2016, she has been using peer review techniques for over fourteen years in her undergraduate and graduate education courses, in online and face-to-face modalities.

Liv Cummins is musical theater dramatist who earned an MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Her musicals focus on historical women characters and have been produced at professional and university venues internationally and across the United States. Cummins initiated the peer review research team in 2016, served as principal investigator from 2016-2018, and co-authored an article about the team’s cross-disciplinary pilot of a peer feedback software tool. She incorporates feedback strategies in all her courses, including drama, literature, playwriting, screenwriting, and composition, in online and face-to-face modalities.

Lisa Spitz is a User Experience Designer with over fifteen years of experience designing for financial service, education technology, business-to-business, and business-to-client businesses and non-profits. As Assistant Professor of Design at Lesley University From 2016-2021, she launched an online Bachelor of Science program in Design for User Experience. Her online and face-to-face design courses all incorporated student-led feedback processes as a primary tool for teaching students how to research and design complex customer experiences. She served as the principal investigator for the peer review research team from 2018-2019, alongside Kimberly Lowe.

Bill Porter has nineteen years of experience in the field of academic technology and instructional design and joined the peer review research team in 2018. As a Learning Technology Designer in the eLearning and Instructional Support Department he conducts research on methods and tools for peer feedback. Porter is a multidisciplinary visual artist who has exhibited nationally and holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Lesley Art + Design. As an Adjunct Professor in LA+D’s Animation and Motion Media Department since 2015, he incorporates peer feedback in all his face-to-face, hybrid and online courses.

Kimberly Lowe is a historian with a Ph.D. in History from Yale University. Her historical publications focus on the history of humanitarian organizations and international humanitarian law during the twentieth century. Lowe joined the peer review research team in 2016 and served as a principal investigator from 2018-2019 alongside Lisa Spitz. She uses peer review with undergraduate First Year Seminar students practicing public speaking skills and history students practicing analytic writing, in online and face-to-face modalities.

Peggy L. Maki, PhD in literature and linguistics, University of Delaware, writes, speaks about, and consults with higher education organizations and institutions on the process of assessing student learning, an internally motivated and shared commitment to currently enrolled students’ equitable progress toward achieving high-quality learning outcomes.

She has consulted at over 610 institutions in the United States and abroad and has written books and articles on assessment for more than 20 years. Her previous book, Real-Time Student Assessment: Meeting the Imperative for Improved Time to Degree, Closing the Opportunity Gap, and Assuring Student Competencies for 21st-Century Needs (Stylus, 2017), challenges institutions to prioritize the use of chronological assessment results to benefit enrolled students compared with the more common practice of prolonged assessment cycles that generally benefit future students.

She served as the former American Association for Higher Education’s (AAHE) senior scholar on assessment; a consultant in the Association of American Colleges & Universities’ (AAC&U’s) annual General Education and Assessment Institutes; and a member of several advisory boards, including one for the Lumina Foundation.

Currently, she serves on the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA) advisory board. Recently an accredited organization in the United Kingdom invited her to design and teach online professional development courses and workshops among those it offers worldwide to higher education. She is the recipient of a national teaching award, the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching.

Table of Contents

Foreword—Peggy Maki

Acknowledgments

Introduction: What I Hear Peer Review, I Think…

1: Research on Peer Review: Benefits, Challenges, and Best Practices

2: Pre-Peer Review: Preparing Students to Engage in Peer Review

3: Peer Review: Facilitating Students to Exchange Feedback

4: Post-Peer Review: Guiding Students to Use Feedback

5: Incorporating the Three-Part Protocol Into Your Course

6: Fostering a Shared Culture of Peer Review Beyond Your Course

Appendix A: Three-Part Protocol for Effective Peer Review

Appendix B: Case Studies

Appendix C: Guide to Peer Review Tools

References

About the Authors

Index

Editorial Reviews

Distinguished by its depth and breadth of coverage, Student-Led Peer Review: A Practical Guide for Online and F2F College Courses takes a deep exploratory dive into the range of factors faculty need to address to effectively design and implement student-led formative review processes that are educationally beneficial both to peer reviewers themselves and to fellow students who receive those reviews in face-to-face and online courses. Drawing on research on peer-led review, on faculty and student criticisms of or reluctance to engage in peer-led review processes, and on authors’ own IRB-approved research on designing, integrating and conducting cross-disciplinary research on peer led reviews, Lowe, Cummins, Clark, Porter, and Spitz have developed a much needed exemplary practical guide to the principles, strategies, and steps that underlie the design, integration, and preparation of students to engage effectively in peer-led reviews.

I laud Lowe, Cummins, Clark, Porter, and Spitz’s comprehensive exploration of what it realistically takes to support and promote a commitment to peer review that, in turn, leads to students’ development of enduring capabilities. To those who may aim to write about the design and implementation of other educational practices, let this practical guide serve as an exemplary model: it is grounded in research; it recognizes the range of challenges those who implement a practice need to address both in teaching and learning; it identifies specific strategies and steps to addresses those challenges—particularly for our student demographics and the contexts within which they learn; and it identifies strategies to build a longitudinal and shared commitment to students’ attainment of the desired outcomes of a practice. Bravo, Authors.

Peggy L. Maki From the Foreword

"This book offers a research-based, practitioner-focused approach to using peer review in the classroom. The authors do a masterful job of anticipating the challenges of student peer review and describing the considerable benefits that accrue when students are asked to take responsibility, think critically and gain agency. The book is an excellent resource for teachers, as it provides strong rationale for encouraging peer review and compelling ideas for designing instruction and environments that foster student growth in this vital area. Highly recommended!"

Peter Afflerbach