COMMENTARY ON VETERINARY BIOMOLECULAR SCIENCES PEER REVIEW DESIGN
An important feature of the peer review design in this Biomolecular Sciences course was that it engaged students in clarifying their understanding of factual material. Most peer review tasks reported in the literature focus on open-ended tasks like essays and reports. Hence the focus on factual material opens up new possibilities for enhancing learning. Another interesting feature is that the review rubric in this intervention required that students engage in a detailed analysis of the actual answers produced by peers with marks awarded for different components of that answer. This should give students a very good indication about how marks are awarded which was an intention of the lecturers who introduced peer review.
Elsewhere on this website I have pointed out the dangers associated with asking students to mark other's work. How does this square with this intervention? The main reason that most students don't like to mark is that they report that they do not believe they have the skill or experience to make such judgements. In these scenarios students are normally being asked to mark open-ended tasks and this requires considerable expertise. Instead, in this implementation of peer review the requirements are different. The task is tightly bounded and there are set marks allocated in the rubric for each component of the required explanation for the question. Hence this peer review task makes it easy for students to allocate marks and therefore it does not fit the normal pattern. All this suggests that more research is needed on the effects of marking when the allocations are clearly defined as opposed to more open-ended scenarios where awarding marks is complex and requires considerable experience.
David Nicol has supplied this commentary and the views expressed are his personal opinions only. Readers should bear in mind that the design of learning tasks is a complex process and that each design decision has varying and multiple effects.