Abstract:

Many institutions state student peer review in their learning outcomes; students should know how to provide proper feedback to a product from one of their peers, but also how to incorporate feedback from their peers. Students peer review is very important to increase students academic attitude and their learning process.The question is, how should this be achieved?.

We asked ourselves a few questions:
1) Should the peer review process be anonymous?
2) How often should students write peer reviews; how many papers at once?
3) Should specific students be excluded/included from the process?
4) Should guiding questions be provided, if so: what should those questions be?
5) Should this process be graded (by students), and count this towards the final grade?
6) Should this process take place in a controlled offline setting at the university, or can the assignment be created online (using specified peer review software).
7) Can this process stimulate the instinsic motivation of students so they will peer review each others work, even when it is not guided by the lecturer?

With a literature search we adressed some of these questions. Also we did some applied research with first year Biomedical Sciences students during courses where academic skills were taught; for over three years we tried several peer review methods, everytime a few aspects were changed and the peer review process and the students evaluations were examined.

Evaluation showed that adding a peer review assignment to an assignment on academic skills creates a high learning efficiency, increased intrinsic motication and a critical attitude. Moreover, it didn't cost a lot of time and effort for the lecturer. However, the set up of the peer review process should carefully be considered. Students have to learn how to provide proper feedback, and the lecturer should provide guiding questions. Also, it seems better if students review more than one paper, to achieve feeling with the process, and to recieve feedback from multiple perspectives. It could also be beneficial to let students grade the peer review they recieve, but this seems not necessary for a proper peer review process.

Alltogether peer review is easy to implement and has many advantages for the intrinsic motivation and critical attitude of students.