Title: Building Research Skills Through Being a Peer Reviewer

Authors:

Lisa Benson, Clemson University; Editor, Journal of Engineering Education Kelsey Watts, Clemson University

Mia Ko, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Balsam Albayati, Clemson University

Becky Bates, Minnesota State University, Mankato

Karin Jensen, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Gary Lichtenstein, Quality Evaluation Designs

Venue: Paper presented at the 2021 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition (virtual), July 26, 2021;

Winner of Best Paper, New Engineering Educators Division

Abstract: This paper describes a peer reviewer mentoring program called the Engineering Education Research Peer Review Training (EER PERT) project and serves as a pilot study on longitudinal effects on researchers’ productivity and the impact of their work, differences in these factors for those who review journal manuscripts and those who review grant proposals, and what aspects of peer review training (knowledge, resources, collaborations, etc.) participants actually carry forward in their own research. Overall, the project seeks to investigate how engineering education research (EER) scholars develop skills and schema for reviewing scholarship, particularly in terms of developing constructive reviews that build expertise and advance knowledge. The Journal of Engineering Education (JEE) Mentored Reviewer Program constitutes the first phase of the EER PERT project. In this paper, we report on goals, structure and activities for the JEE Mentored Reviewer Program, pilot data from participants’ applications and exit surveys that will inform the EER PERT project in terms of participants’ developing skills and schema for reviewing and conducting EER, and provide initial suggestions from the training program that may benefit scholars new to EER.