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Incorporating Student Peer Review in Online, Blended, and Face-to-Face Classes
Peer review is a structured process by which students evaluate the work of their peers. Having students engage in peer review isn’t just an assessment strategy—it’s a powerful practice that is known to promote student success.
Four Powerful Practices
As Drs. Voegele, Benson, and Gallavan (2025) discuss in their article “Four Powerful Practices to Promote Student Success” promoting and nurturing curiosity, communication, connection, and compassion enhances student engagement and learning outcomes by fostering deeper cognitive involvement and supportive community building. Integrating peer review into your courses - both online and face-to-face - invites students to actively engage with each other’s work, elevating curiosity as learners explore wide-ranging perspectives, strengthening communication through constructive feedback, and promoting deeper connections.
Collaborative Learning Communities
Asking students to review the work of their peers contributes to building collaborative learning communities where students are connected to one another and work together as partners in learning by creating structured opportunities for students to interact, share feedback and learn from each other.
Communication and Constructive Feedback
Peer review is essentially structured feedback from classmates, helping students learn to communicate about academic work more effectively. This helps learners:
- Understand expectations better,
- Reflect on their own work, and
- Practice specific feedback skills that improve learning outcomes.
In online settings where instructor feedback can feel distant, peer review expands communication beyond instructor-student alone.
Reinforcing Connections between Students and Content
Peer review supports connections not just to the instructor but among students and content by:
- Encouraging students to engage deeply with peers’ work, which strengthens their own understanding, and
- Helping them see multiple perspectives on the same material, which deepens connections to course concepts and the larger learning community.
Deeper Engagement with Active Learning
Practices like open-ended conversations, idea sharing, and higher-order thinking boost engagement.
Peer review is a tool for that: giving and receiving peer feedback pushes students into active engagement, not just passive consumption of content. Research outside the article shows that structured online peer feedback can enhance student engagement and academic confidence.
Facilitating Peer Review in Canvas
Canvas at UIS has two options for facilitating graded peer review in your class: