Fostering Connection and Engagement Evaluating Student Peer Review Experience in Graduate Asynchronous Research Courses

Seven week asynchronous formats for nursing education offer scheduling flexibility to learners, however their condensed nature may inadvertently reduce opportunities for critical thinking, meaningful peer discussions, and thorough engagement with course content. Pedagogy that includes constructive experiential teaching methods has been demonstrated to improve nursing students’ skills for training, analyzing, and problem solving, and learner engagement. This study implemented an experiential low-stakes assignment of peer review in an asynchronous 7-week graduate research course. Students submitted drafts of final papers for anonymous peer review, thereby simultaneously experiencing the roles of anonymous reviewer and evaluated author. Rubrics were provided and each student was required to identify strengths and weaknesses of their assigned author’s manuscript. A retrospective, mixed-method narrative design was employed to evaluate the impact of a low stakes anonymous peer review assignment on student engagement and learning. One hundred five narratives from five online research courses were evaluated. Ninety-eight percent of learner narratives reflected engaged learning, 55% identified improvement in writing skills, and 77% indicated a sense of belonging to a culture of collective learning. Utilization of a low stakes peer review assignment with well scaffolded, student-centered, experiential constructivist pedagogy improved student engagement in learning, writing skills, as well as created a virtual atmosphere of student supported collaboration through the development of a culture of collective learning.