Improving Students’ Assessment and Evaluation Experience in Higher Education: A Formative Peer Review Perspective

This thesis is about student peer review in undergraduate education. The research uses a case study of the Ecology programme at the University of Otago, New Zealand, to gain insight into this phenomenon. Ecology at Otago provides a useful case study because students are taught to become peer reviewers over the three years of the programme. Students also get to experience peer review in five different formats, each building in complexity and challenge. As such, it provides an ideal context for studying the rich potential of peer review in undergraduate education. It is presently accepted that peer review, as a specialised form of peer feedback, can improve students’ learning. Learning gains are reported to include the enhancement of generic transferable skills, critical thinking, self-assessment, self-regulation of learning and self-reflection. However, the existing literature has a number of limitations. For example, much of the work is conceptual while the empirical studies are focused on single events. What is not known is how the outcomes of these reported events would change through structured training and experience over time. In addition, the conclusions of the published studies are mixed, with reports that students like peer feedback, do not like it, find it beneficial or see no value in the exercises. These contradictory results are likely to be partly caused by the context and very brief encounters students have with each exercise. There are also theoretical concerns around the concepts that underpin peer review and other forms of feedback. For example, it has been claimed that peer review is ‘dialogic;’ the meaning of this term will be theorised in this thesis. With respect to these challenges, this study set out to answer the following questions in the context of the Ecology programme: 1) how do undergraduate students perceive their peer review experiences?; 2) how do students respond to feedback in the review process?; and 3) can peer review skills gained in Ecology be transferred to other learning settings? In answering these questions, the thesis will provide new evidence and conceptual argument about best practice and how to achieve the full benefits of student peer review and, in doing so, will make a contribution to the theories of this practice and to student feedback more generally. To answer these questions, a longitudinal qualitative study was undertaken. Twelve students were recruited and interviewed in two successive years. The first interviews took place after the third peer review activity which was a month-long peer review exercise in the students’ second year of study in the Ecology programme, and the second round of interviews was conducted after the fifth peer review activity in the students’ third year of study. Semi-structured interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed using a general inductive approach. From this, themes were developed in conjunction with the research questions. In addition, I adapted a theoretical feedback model to ascertain the quality and impact of feedback comments and to compare academic staff and student peer reviews in the second-year double-blinded exercise. This exercise included a rebuttal process in which students were forced to explain the rationale for accepting and rejecting comments. This rebuttal element appears to be unique and is not found in published accounts on peer review. Findings suggest that while training and multiple experiences were beneficial, this was not merely a matter of ‘more is better.’ Rather, a series of different review exercise designs, that increased in complexity, enhanced learning, contributed to normalising the activity, and created a shared identity and culture among the student cohort, was found to be most useful. As students became more experienced, they reported being less threatened by the pressure of commenting on their peers’ work. By the end of their second year, they had begun to realise the full value of peer review for their own learning. Peer review became a type of ‘research inquiry’ that lead to: a) a deeper understanding of disciplinary knowledge, b) realisation of what being a peer reviewer could achieve, c) new knowledge about self, and d) new knowledge about others-as-learners. All these outcomes were made possible because the exercises included written feedback and structured discussions, which I argue allows peer review to claim that it is truly dialogic. Consequently, some students were in a position to provide feedback of similar quality to that of staff, and most were able to critically question the feedback they received. Being engaged in a culture of peer review allowed students to apply their skills and knowledge to contexts within and beyond the Ecology programme to improve their overall learning experience and help others. The peer review process eventually was seen as a shared responsibility for learning and a new student value that is unlikely to be attained with a one-off experience. The outcomes of this thesis have much wider implications for higher education because it demonstrates that setting up student peer review as a progressive sequence of purely formative exercises over time, with opportunities for students to engage in dialogic feedback, can be very effective in enhancing higher-order learning skills, which are the foundation of an advanced education. While some of the earlier research suggests that students do not use peer feedback, or lack the motivation to do so, the findings from this study demonstrate that, with experience, students start to expect and provide ‘quality’ feedback that they can use to critically revise their work. Students came to see peer review as an integral part of learning through research and creating new knowledge. The findings also demonstrate that transferring peer review skills and knowledge to other situations is mediated by students’ long-term exposure and developing abilities to self-regulate learning, and results in a change in values centred on care for others and their learning