Influencing Student Learning Through a Community-Based Peer Review Process

Abstract

This chapter contains a discussion of the characteristics and features of peer review practices in a community of learners and how the use of peer review as a cognitive tool embedded in a social process improves the learning processes of the reviewers. However, if peer reviews are to be used with the same degree of seriousness as expert reviews, the authors feel it is necessary to prove that they can be equivalent. To that end, the authors compared peer review scores with expert review scores to test if peer reviews are as reliable proportionally as expert reviews. The findings of the data analysis proved that peer review scores are closely correlated to expert review scores, and peer review scores become more reliable when there are more than three peer reviewers.