Promoting student peer review in Australian tertiary education

Project overview

Student peer reviews can play a valuable role in tertiary education to promote student learning and increase satisfaction with the volume and quality of feedback. However, implementation of peer review remains challenging, since there is no widely available, flexible and customisable software solution available to manage student peer review in diverse educational contexts.

This project will make an easy-to-use and feature-rich online student peer review tool available to educators and students across the higher education sector in Australia, building on a highly successful, award-winning prototype developed at The University of Melbourne. Our tool will be tailored to the needs of Australian academics, and we will create an extensive set of accompanying resources, including guides for academics and students, links to tutorials and examples, and social networks of practitioners. We will promote the use of these resources to encourage broader uptake, sharing of best practice, and research into student peer review, and in the process help to bring about long-term improvements in the quality of learning and teaching nationally.

Student peer review is widely recognised as an effective aid to formative assessment. Yet, as a pedagogical tool it has not been as widely adopted as might be expected. There are three likely impediments to growth in the adoption of student peer review as a learning tool:

1. It is administratively onerous to implement
2. We still know relatively little about its potential to improve student learning
3. Few resources are available to staff to help them with implementing student peer review

Our goal in this project is to support and encourage more widespread implementation of, and experimentation with, student peer review across the Australian tertiary education sector, by reducing or removing these impediments.

Project team

• Raoul A. Mulder (Zoology)
• Victoria Millar (Centre for the Study of Higher Education)
• Jon Pearce
• Chi Baik (Centre for the Study of Higher Education)

Project information

Publications

• Pearce, J. M., Mulder, R. and Bai, C. Involving students in peer review: case studies and practical strategies for university teaching. 2009.
• Mulder, R & Pearce, J. PRAZE: Innovating teaching through online peer review presented at ASCILITE 2007.