Peer review is a practical way to examine nursing performance and quality of care. It is a systematic process of evaluation of a peer's work, compared with standards, which facilitates quality improvement (American Nurses Association, 2015). In the academic setting, peer review is a tool for active learning as students interact with content and receive feedback from each other. Effective peer review requires knowledge, skills, and attitudes that are learned and cultivated; however, there are no clearly defined best practices for teaching it (Sethares & Morris, 2016). In both the online and in-class environments, students express concerns about peer review related to fairness, quality, accuracy of peer feedback, and retribution (Ohaja, Dunlea, & Muldoon, 2013). These concerns are often a basis for negative attitudes that undermine peer review in nursing practice. The primary goals for this experiential learning assignment were to develop evaluative communication skills for professional peer review and increase knowledge of SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely) goal development. In a required online course, graduate nursing students were assigned to develop a SMART goal to direct a quality improvement project. Students were then assigned to review the work of two classmates using an open source, online peer review application called iPeer (version 3.1.5). Preparation for the assignment included completing an online didactic module describing key characteristics and techniques for effective feedback. Key characteristics of effective peer feedback include (a) a focused review referring to specific performance standards, (b) descriptive comments reflecting unbiased observations, (c) constructive language 374
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.