VKP Glossary

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Peer Review

From: Hansen and Stephens, 45-47

Making peer assessment function as an active, supportive reflection on learning progress rather than as a token-economy of performance rewards is the litmus test of collaborative learner-centered teaching approaches. Students and instructors alike need to be dedicated to this goal. If convenience or fear prevent students from providing honest feedback to each other, chances are they won't practice on themselves and will never develop a capacity for critical self-assessment…. Besides its role in reflecting on learner progress, peer-assessment also emphasizes the importance of group process in general. How students arrive at a learning outcome can be just as critical as the outcome itself…. The practice of peer-evaluation calls attention to the fact that learning is not merely private, but a social act that makes students accountable to others. At some point in the future, students' knowledge will be applied to serve others in the workplace or in the community.

Structured peer review of teaching is a vehicle for developing teaching skills and deepening one's understanding of the modern learning community. This project will create a model community of scholars who engage in regular substantive peer review to derive benefit from both reviewing and being reviewed.

From: The Australian Scholarship in Teaching Project's "Peer Review for Learning about Teaching" web site, http://www.clt.uts.edu.au/Scholarship/astpm2review.html.

Peer review describes the process of colleagues applying the process of critical review to their own and to each other's work for mutual learning. Teachers collaborating to inquire into their teaching using reflection, observation and inquiry into aspects of teaching to use each other as a mirror to better reflect on the nature of their work in order to better understand.

Also see the American Association for Higher Education's "The Peer Review of Teaching" website, http://www.aahe.org/teaching/Peer_Review.htm, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's "Peer Review of Teaching" web site, http://www.unl.edu/peerrev/about/index.html.