Good Friends Are Hard to Find: Promoting Peer Review Among Doctoral Students Through Critical Friends

Purpose: Peer review and feedback assist doctoral students in developing their scholarly writing (Adamek, 2015; Aitchison, 2014). However, PhD nursing students report a lack of comfort in giving constructive feedback and desire specific guidelines for conducting peer review (Sethares & Morris, 2016). Critical Friends is a protocol which uses six-steps to promote critical dialogue within an intellectual community (Costantino, 2010). The protocol can be used to structure peer review by incorporating both tuning questions to focus the feedback and a facilitator who focuses and debriefs the review session. Entry-level PhD nursing students in an introductory course used the protocol to peer review a scholarly writing assignment. Faculty served in the role of facilitator. Students were encouraged to continue using Critical Friends during their studies. The purpose of this sequential, mixed-methods study (Chiang-Hanisko, Newman, Dyess, Piyakong, & Liehr, 2016) was to examine the contribution of Critical Friends upon the evolution of PhD nursing students as scholarly writers in their first year of doctoral studies.

Methods: Participants included 18 PhD nursing students from three cohorts within one Southeastern college of nursing. Data on student experiences with Critical Friends and perceptions of peer review were collected from reflective learning journals, interviews, the Writing Process Questionnaire (Lonka et al., 2014) and the Writerly Self-Efficacy Tool (Schmidt & Alexander, 2012). Data were analyzed using content analysis and descriptive statistics.

Results: Analysis resulted in three themes: Finding Comfort in the Uncomfortable, Contemplating Criticism: Friend or Foe, and “The Blind Leading the Blind.” Students reported increased comfort with writing as a result of their experiences with Critical Friends. While 100% of students agreed peer feedback is useful, less than half initiated Critical Friends with peers in their first year of study. Students who attempted to practice Critical Friends during their first year used the protocol informally, often without the use of tuning questions or review of early drafts. Emotions such as anxiety, vulnerability, and sense of community were reported when contemplating their experiences with constructive criticism. Faculty-led experiences supported student learning of how to critique scholarly writing as opposed to students blindly leading each other. At the end of year one, writing surveys reveal the majority of students (71%) report distress when writing and 44% report a lack of competency in providing valuable feedback to peers.

Conclusion: Critical Friends is recommended as a pedagogical strategy to enhance learner outcomes by building capacity for scholarly writing. Students struggled initiating Critical Friends on their own, so embedding the protocol in courses during the first year of study is recommended. To establish an effective writing community where peer review is valued, students need a sufficient level of competence to review the work of others (Roulston et al., 2016). Therefore, faculty are encouraged to serve in the role of facilitator to model the protocol and mentor students in peer review. Critical Friends may facilitate a sense of community among peers which have the potential to foster capacity for scholarly writing (Tyndall, Forbes, Avery, & Powell, 2019).