Peer-review in practice: eight years of Aropä

Articles discussing and analysing student peer-review activities proliferate the educational literature, typically describing one or more class exercises where students provide feedback on each other’s work. These papers usually focus on a peer-review activity designed as a scholarly study, and make conclusions about its success or otherwise. There is not one standard model for ‘peer-review’, and information on the many different assessment designs used is distributed over an increasing number of publications and websites. This paper provides a meta-review of peer-review activities as they are implemented in practice, using configuration data from over a thousand assignments conducted using an online peer-review system during an eight-year period. We present data on the wide variety of assignment designs and the parameters that comprise them, their rubrics, and comparisons between subject areas. Information on the norms and range of all decisions to be made will encourage instructors (both new to and experienced in conducting peer-review activities) to reflect on and justify the choices they make.