HR: 16:45h
AN: ED22F-04    [PDF]
TI: ROAST: Peer Review as a Learning and Assessment Tool in Graduate Education
AU: * Somerville, R C
EM: rsomerville@ucsd.edu
AF: Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive Dept. 0224, La Jolla, CA 92093-0224 United States
AB: Constructivist learning theory and inquiry-based educational practice stress the parallels between learning and research. Although peer review has long been a central feature of the working lives of research scientists, it has rarely found its way into the classroom. Motivated by this thought, an imaginary journal, Reviews of Atmospheric Science Topics (ROAST), has been integrated into a graduate-level course in atmospheric thermodynamics. The instructor acts as editor of ROAST. Students in the class are divided into teams and assigned topics on which to write survey papers and give in-class presentations, using the text, the Internet, the library, and other resources. The assigned topics range over the subject matter of the course. The submitted survey papers are sent by the ROAST editor to other members of the class, acting as anonymous reviewers. Just as in the case of real research journals, the editor asks the authors to respond to criticisms of reviewers and then sends the revised papers back to the reviewers. Each student is thus a researcher and co-author of one paper as well as an anonymous reviewer of several others. ROAST has proven to be not only a useful means of fostering learning, but also a natural and effective assessment tool. The peer review mechanism allows the student authors to address the defects in their papers, and hence in their learning, as pointed out not by an authority figure or an examination but by their own peers. As an important side benefit, the students gain experience with the peer review process itself and come to appreciate its strengths and weaknesses in evaluating scientific papers.
DE: 6605 Education
SC: Education and Human Resources [ED]
MN: 2003 Fall Meeting