Engaging One on One: The Peer Review Process

Part I:

The first five weeks of this course has taught me a tremendous amount of material, despite the grueling work involved. I have developed my critical thinking skills that is much more efficient and sophisticated within a short span of time.

In class, we discussed our rough drafts of the HCP and pointed out immediate errors that we noticed that were prominent in each other's essays. Pointing out the most prominent mistakes put a greater concern on these areas which made me realize that these are the errors that I need to focus on first when revising my essay.

The individual peer review assignment involved reading through the essay once without any commentary, and then again with comments, ending with a final evaluation by scoring on the rubric. This made me realize what my own personal strengths and weaknesses are by examining how other people wrote their own essays. I realized although I have greatly improved in selecting and skimming research articles to see if they are a good fit for purpose, I have not demonstrated that in my essay. I simply summarized what I read in all of my research articles, but I did not present it well in an organized fashion and nor did it flow with the thesis, as some of classmate noted on the peer review.

A few of the learning objectives that I learned within the bast five weeks are:

• Learn to locate sources using a variety of tools, methods, and databases.

• Understand the purposes and methods of common citation systems.

I have definitely become more adept at utilizing the university's accredited search engines because I have found a myriad of sources that "talk" to each other, meaning that these sources references famous scientists in my particular field of study. I also know what resources are academic and trustworthy or not.

Another objective that I felt that I have reached was recognizing rhetorical persuasion. The many articles that I researched had very explicit theses that made understand immediately what the authors were going to present their research on.

Part II:

Overall, the peer review experience was another learning process for me. Some advice that I gave to me peers were very similar in that they were content based. One of my peers did a superior job on the draft as well, so I learned from her essay of the things that I was lacking. I wrote to my peers that transitions and the thesis could be more prominent because the purpose of one of the essays wasn't clear enough to me.