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

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.

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.