Benefits of Peer Review on Students’ Writing

Writing has long been recognized as both an outcome and method of successful pedagogy in psychology. Accordingly, there are a number of methods that successful instructors have employed to teach psychology students how to write. One such method is to facilitate students’ reviewing each other’s written work (i.e., to engage in peer review), although the research on this as an efficacious classroom intervention has thus far been limited. In this study we examine the benefits of implementing student reviews of peers’ written work in a senior-level undergraduate psychology course ( N = 59). Results suggest that the more critical students were of their peers’ writing, the higher their grades were on their own writing, an effect that persisted when controlling for grades on previous written assignments and the effect of feedback received from peers on their written work. These findings extend previous research on the effect of student peer reviewing and highlight the utility of implementing peer review in the psychology classroom.