Use of Peer Review of Projects to Enhance Upper Level Geotechnical Engineering Courses

Student peer review has been integrated to multiple upper level (i.e., graduate and senior technical elective) geotechnical engineering courses at California Polytechnic State University. The peer review process was established as an integral part of a term project that included a written report and oral presentation to the class. A staged sequence of deadlines and milestones was administered to assure that students maintained progress with their projects. The format of the term papers was highly prescribed and based on a template for technical conference manuscripts. Content from the student projects was included in the final examination supporting a students teaching students integrated learning environment. Peer review was determined to be beneficial to the students in terms of both technical content and writing skills. Student assessment of the teaching methodology is provided. Faculty observations of experiences are described in the paper and suggestions are provided for effective use of this teaching methodology. Introduction and Background Peer review is common for all scientific publications as well as for engineering design work in professional practice. Integration of peer review to the curriculum has been reported for a variety of implementation modes. Limited experiences in this regard have been reported for civil engineering coursework in relation to technical writing. Rationale for including peer review in coursework includes emphasizing the development of technical writing skills and promoting an active and collaborative classroom environment. Inclusion of professional skills in the civil engineering curriculum has become increasingly important through the implementation of the Body of Knowledge. In some cases of implementing peer review into the classroom experience, peer review is considered part of writing in teams. 3, 4 Conventional team writing has been documented to have limited interactions in producing cohesive final written documents. 5 In at least one instance (Ref. 4), a highly structured writing cycle was implemented to allow laboratory team members an opportunity to serve in different roles associated with typical peer review process (i.e., lead author, reviewer, editor). These roles were rotated to permit each student an opportunity to serve in each role during the term. In addition, prescriptive content both for writing assignments and for peer review/grading rubrics (e.g., Calibrated Peer Review, CPR) have been developed. The CPR allows web-managed peer review administration for courses. Gragson and Hagen (Ref. 4) reported reducing the number of assignments (by combining topics) after incorporating peer review as to emphasize fewer, more substantial writing assignments compared to the conventional curriculum.