The Power of Peer Review: Harnessing Collaborative Insights for Authentic Assessment

Introduction

In Education field, peer review is a collaborative learning technique wherein students assess other student’s work and provide feedback to help them improve the overall learning process. It also assists the students to get insights and gain understanding about peer’s work; hence, it tends to improve the quality of the learning experience. In many literatures, peer review is referred to peer evaluation, response or peer assessment in which students are involved to review the material from critical perspective with different approaches (Topping, 2023). This activity is typically beneficial in triggering critical reasoning and self-assessment skills in students. Peer review has proved to be a powerful evaluation strategy which brings numerous advantages to the students such as facilitating student’s acquisition and developing skills that promotes self-direction of own learning.

In recent years, the concept of peer review in higher education has gained attention due to its impact on collaborative learning. Over three decades, peer review has been used in different disciplines and especially in education as a formative process that aims to improve student’s learning experience. In student-learning context, peer review is termed as a process wherein students evaluate the value and quality of fellow student’s work by simply giving feedback or response as per own understanding. As per the study of Peters el.al., (2023), student peer- review shifts the traditional notion of assessment by teachers only as it encourages the students to take an active role in managing their own learning.

In contemporary classrooms, peer- review comes in varied forms such as evaluating written assessments, oral presentations, artwork, programming and code reviews in different teamwork. In classrooms, the activity of peer review is used to help students invest in writing and to understand the relationship between their writing and their coursework. Hence, it engages the learners to encourage self-reflexivity which eventually fosters critical thinking skills (Noroozi et al., 2023). At the same time, it provides a structured learning process for the students wherein they can assess other’s work and develop collaborative learning experience by focusing on new techniques and ways to improve the learning journey. Peer review assist the students to engage in metacognitive reflection in which they learn the correct as well as incorrect aspects in the answers by understanding the criteria outlined by the instructors. Therefore, this is effective in opening doors for collaborative exchange of ideas among students which not only improves their understanding but also helps them to produce better work in the future. Hence, according to contemporary classroom settings, peer review is more likely to create a cohesive community which develops various skills in students such as communication, collaboration and critical thinking ability (Martin & Bolliger, 2023).