Peer Review of Academic Papers
Agile Concepts
- Kanban board
- Timeboxing
- Iterations
Peak Learning Practices
- Collaboration
- Smallify
- Transparency
Learning & Teaching
In a week-long summer graduate course, four students wrote an academic paper of approximately 15 pages on a change process that they could implement in their own school setting.
The paper had a number of required sections, including abstract, introduction, background, problem statement, literature review, change framework, conclusion, references, and appendices. Students shared their papers, as a Google doc, with each other and the instructor to facilitate peer review.
The students each created a personal kanban board with four columns:
| To write | Writing | Ready for peer review | Just reviewed |
| | | | |
On Monday the students made a sticky note for each section of their paper and placed them in the “To write” column.
By Wednesday the students were ready to begin the process of critique and revision. This was their process:
- Students updated their personal kanban boards. It was easy to see at a glance that all students now had some sections of their paper in the “Ready for peer review” column.
- We agreed on a time-box of forty minutes. Students and the instructor, as peer reviewers, selected a section (a sticky note, which they initialed) to critique.
- When a review of a particular section was finished, the reviewer moved the sticky note to the “Just reviewed” column and chose a new section, either from the same or a different scrum board.
- Nearly all sections had been critiqued and reviewed when the time-box expired. Using a thumbs up, thumbs down (Roman) vote, students either decided to finish the remaining few sections or leave them for the evening outside of class time.
- On Thursday, students reset their kanban boards, according to their progress from the evening before, and we redid the process.
Source
From a course taught for Endicott College, Prague, 2016 Questions: Paul Magnuson, [email protected], Twitter: @zebmagnuson