Teachers' Concerns For teachers, a common concern about student peer review is that students are unlikely to have sufficient knowledge to provide meaningful critiques of other students' work. In EI, we try to minimize this constraint by having students review research that is similar to projects they themselves have carried out. For example, students who have performed lettuce seed bioassays using NaCl should be able to provide meaningful critiques of similar experiments using a different compound or a different range of concentrations. In evaluating other students' research reports, students are likely to gain insights about choices they have made in their own experiments. Inevitably, some students will receive peer reviews that are not substantive and helpful.
Plagiarism is another possible concern for teachers.
In the case of EI student research, the student provides evidence of original work at each stage of the research process, from designing the experiment through presenting the results. Although it would be possible for a student to copy someone else's final results, this would be meaningless because the previous steps in the research process would be missing.