Acknowledging Students' Collaborations through Peer Review: A Footnoting Practice

ABSTRACT

Student-to-student peer review or peer feedback is commonly used in student-centered or active-learning classrooms. In this article, we describe a footnoting exercise that we implemented in two of our undergraduate courses as one way to encourage students to acknowledge collaborations and contributions made during peer-review processes. This exercise was developed in response to a teaching problem well documented in the literature and often experienced firsthand in our own courses: students do not always transfer to future iterations of their work what they have learned in response to previous feedback. Following a description of the footnoting exercise, we analyze the resulting footnotes that the students produced. Finally, we discuss possible improvements to the assignment and avenues for future research.

Keywords:

• Disciplinary learning
• peer feedback
• peer review
• transfer
• writing in the disciplines
• writing pedagogy

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Michael Palmer for offering helpful feedback on an initial draft of this article and for making this particular suggestion, which we agreed will enrich the exercise significantly. We would also like to express gratitude to those anonymous College Teaching reviewers who provided feedback on this article. They were especially helpful in pointing out ways to further improve the practice we introduce here, and many of their comments have been integrated into the last section of this paper in particular.

Notes

1. Due to the methodological diversity within Religious Studies, these conventions are not universal.

2. See, for instance, the popular Writing in the Disciplines (WID) movement.

3. We received IRB approval through both of our institutions to work with this student data from our courses.

4. All student names have been changed to protect their identities.