COMMENTARY ON PROFESSIONAL SKILLS AND ISSUES COURSE
One interesting feature in this peer review example is the requirement that students must summarise the peer's essay and its main arguments, at the start of the review. Summarising is a high-level cognitive activity that helps develop in reviewers important transferable skills - the ability to extract the core ideas behind text and express these in their own words. So summarising benefits the reviewer. However, the output of the review, the summary, also affords benefits for those being reviewed: the reviewee learns how different readers respond to and interpret their written texts. This can help those producing text to improve their writing skills.
A number of issues are raised in this case example. Some of these might be addressed through a re-design of some aspects of the peer review process. The following are some possible considerations. (i) In future implementations, it might be a good idea not to ask the students to rate each other's work - the rating requirement in the rubric added little value to the peer review design and might have been the cause of the students' concern that there were discrepancies in peer and teacher marks. In published studies of peer reviewing, the marking element is invariably the source of student dissatisfaction. (ii) Reconsider the rationale for having students rate and comment on the quality of the feedback provided by peers. This component might be a valuable learning experience. However, students might feel this is a distraction if they are already concerned about the essay writing task. (iii) The lecturer had concerns about the range of writing ability across the different cohorts (Masters and Level 4 students). If this is contributing to the dissatisfaction then it might be worth having students write essays in groups and then have them individually provide feedback on the essays written by other groups. This would significantly increase the number of reviews students receive. Also, if they then had to update their group essays based on the peer feedback they would have a deep discussion of that feedback and about essay writing (see the other Computing pilot for an example of this approach). (iv) Another possibility, might be to have the two cohorts - Masters and Level 4 students - work as two separate groups if they have quite different levels of writing skills.
David Nicol has supplied this commentary and the views expressed are his personal opinions only. Readers should bear in mind that learning design is complex and each design decision has varying and multiple effects.