Using Peer Review in Honors Courses

Instructors of writing courses have used peer review in their classes for many years, but there is clear application in other disciplines, especially in honors courses in which instructors expect students to be actively engaged in the learning process and students are more likely to possess greater critical thinking skills. Indeed, because most honors courses are writing intensive, potentially all honors faculty are writing teachers. Peer review in academia improves the quality of published material by providing constructive feedback to the authors prior to final publication. Innovators in education have applied this technique in the classroom to a variety of areas including student outcome assessment, group projects, oral presentations, and research papers, thereby allowing students to improve their skills based on the feedback they receive. Assessment of an anonymous peer review assignment in an undergraduate biomedical engineering course suggested that peer review improved grades and critical thinking skills and that it was the most favorable aspect of the course for some of the students . Not only does peer review increase writing quality, but others are advocating its use to increase active learning and make students accountable for the learning process . Peer review also allows students to interact more with each other and experience increased socialization while reducing the amount of time faculty spend on grading written assignments. Four years ago, I began using peer review to help students improve the quality of their research papers in an honors introductory psychology class. Over the years, I collected data from 106 students to determine if they perceived peer review to be beneficial. In a subset of eighteen students, I also tested the hypothesis that peer review would result in significantly higher grades with each subsequent revision. I assigned students to write an eight- to ten-page research paper in APA format on any psychological topic that I approved. Students were to have a clear hypothesis that was supported by critical interpretation of data from original research articles published in professional journals or other reliable sources. The grades on their papers accounted for approximately one third of their overall course grades. On the assigned due date of the first draft, students were asked to trade papers and make comments on them before the next class period. My plan was to give student reviewers time to provide more thoughtful comments than editing the paper during class would allow. After the initial round of peer review, reviewers returned the papers to their authors who then had about four days to prepare a second draft. The whole process was repeated with the recommendation that they trade papers with a different student than before. Students turned in the final draft along with the previous two drafts containing the comments and evaluations of their two reviewers. To help motivate students to provide sufficient feedback on each other’s papers, I gave additional points for relevant and helpful comments but did not try to quantify the quality of the feedback given by their peers. In one section of eighteen students, a grader from another department who was blind to the purposes of the study also graded each draft with the same grading criteria that I used. In the first several semesters that I used peer review, I provided general instructions for students to make comments on the writing style, grammar, support for the hypothesis, quality of references, etc. However, I found that students were making comments on only a few aspects of the paper (mostly grammar and formatting). To overcome this problem, two semesters ago I started having students apply the formal grading rubric that I use when grading the final draft. The rubric outlines the grading scale for the areas of introduction, sequencing, conclusion, content, accuracy of facts, credibility of sources, focus on topic, support for topic, formatting, and grammar and spelling.