Peer Reviewing Sources: A Framework-Informed Approach to Information Literacy in First-Year Writing

Abstract

Scholarship on peer review has demonstrated its value for students. Standard peer review processes, however, tend to focus on students’ writing rather than their engagement with the sources they work with, leaving the evaluation of students’ information literacy skills to instructors. In the course of our research, we observed in interview transcripts that minoritized students, in some cases, had very different experiences with sources than their majoritized peers, describing strategies for navigating and redressing sources that were biased against some aspect of their identity. Our research team’s work on information literacy has shown that (1) students need support in their writing about popular sources; (2) minoritized students demonstrate superior critical information literacy skills compared to majoritized students; and (3) standard measures of assessment often overlook the superior information literacy skills that minoritized students possess.