Despite several strides made, governance has remained a foundational issue to be addressed in the struggle for human rights and inclusive development in Africa. Almost two decades into existence, it has become imperatively necessary to evaluate the success of this struggle through Africa’s monitoring tool - the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM). This work examines the progress attained in the context of Ghana, which has been acclaimed as a leading democracy in Africa and was the first country to be reviewed. Largely through doctrinal research, data was obtained from online sources and visits to key institutions in Ghana including its National APRM (NAPRM) Secretariat. The findings of this work reveal a higher success level in compliance with legal and policy adjustments, although sometimes instituted at a very slow pace. Yet attaining the anticipated human rights impact has remained a challenge. The lack of Ghana’s political will and poor funding as well as poor responsiveness from the APRM international Secretariat have highly impeded the work of Ghana’s NAPRM; including its continuous publication of Program of Action (POA) reports. It has thus mainly resorted to domestic District Governance Assessments (DGAs) which have in themselves not also been regular. The absence of political will has also been the primary obstacle to a subsequent review, and only recently has Ghana started plans to undergo a Targeted Review on specific domestic issues. This attitude has for several decades similarly been transposed into the country’s state reporting obligations under other African human rights monitoring systems, hence affecting their ability to directly impact domestic change in comparison to the APRM. The findings of this work demonstrate the need to strengthen state responsiveness to treaty monitoring obligations, as well as the workings of the APRM in collaboration with other African monitoring mechanisms. / Mini Dissertation (LLM (Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa)) --University of Pretoria, 2021. / European Union / Global Campus of Human Rights / Royal Norwegian Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa / Centre for Human Rights / LLM (Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa) / Unrestricted

The aim with this study is to explore the use of peer review in a Swedish school context. The study focuses on the role of secondary school teachers of English, and the main research question is: “What are teachers’ views of using peer review in the English classroom?” The interviews show that there are several ways and methods to work with writing such as projects that lasts for weeks or smaller task focusing on a certain area. Secondly, it is shown that peer review can be used in both written and oral tasks. Furthermore, the feedback given to the students can be oral or written, and the area of feedback alters depending on the task. Thirdly, the benefits of peer review are that it helps improve critical thinking, as well as the students’ way of discussing language. Lastly, the main challenge is the variety of language proficiency among the students, but with clear instructions, time and practice in an accepting classroom environment, this challenge does not have to be an obstacle.

High attrition rates in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields are major challenges in undergraduate education. Many students enrolled in STEM fields end up switching their majors to non-STEM fields or leave college without earning any academic qualification. Due to these reasons, the United States is facing a critical shortage of future talented STEM personnel in the domestic workforce. Therefore, graduating a sufficient number of talented students in STEM fields has come to national attention. It is important to examine strategies for improving STEM-major retention and undergraduate education in STEM disciplines. The main purpose of this study was to investigate methods to improve students’ social and peer-mentoring interactions within the undergraduate chemistry program at Mississippi State University to improve student learning and their attachment to chemistry and the STEM major. In Chapter II, a study performed to examine peer-mentoring interaction patterns that occur between laboratory partners in the General Chemistry I laboratories is discussed. In this study, five different laboratory partnership types were created. In the development of some partnership types, Math ACT score and lecture section were used as metrics for matching lab partners to create supportive peer-mentoring interactions. Also, students were encouraged to participate in external study groups during the semester. This research study determines whether valued peer-mentoring interactions in the laboratory could support students to be more successful in their chemistry coursework and to have improved social interactions. In Chapter III, a peer review writing assignment that mimics the publication process is presented. This writing assignment supports students to improve their writing skills by reviewing peer write-ups and practicing critical analysis of their work. This assignment is introduced to upper-level undergraduate students to improve their scientific literacy skills in order to prepare them for future scientific communication. In Chapters IV and V, two new laboratory experiments that are connected to real-life scenarios are presented. These laboratory experiments are designed to improve student interest in laboratory learning and to enhance their learning in chromatography techniques and hands-on experience with the GC-MS instrument.

In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird die Problematik der Qualitätssicherung beim wissenschaftlichen Publizieren umfassend diskutiert. Dabei werden die spezifischen Charakteristika hervorgehoben, die sich aus dem elektronischen Publizieren, Open-Access-basierter Geschäftsmodelle und insbesondere bei der Realisierung von Open-Access-Zeitschriften ergeben. Aus den unterschiedlichen Ansätzen, die für die Qualitätsbewertung und deren wesentliche Zielstellung – die Herausfilterung relevanter und geprüfter Informationen – infrage kommen, werden vor allem die Peer-Review-Verfahren näher betrachtet. In diesem Zusammenhang werden Schwachpunkte und prinzipielle Kritik an Peer Review aufgezählt und in den Kontext der bisherigen Untersuchungen auf diesem Gebiet gesetzt. Wesentlicher Bestandteil der Arbeit ist eine Klassifikation von Peer-Review-Verfahren anhand unterschiedlicher Eigenschaften und deren möglicher Ausprägungen. Obwohl Peer Review seit Jahrzehnten Gegenstand teils grundsätzlicher Kritik ist, wird dieser Ansatz noch immer als Mittel der Wahl für die vor der Publikation stattfindende Qualitätssicherung betrachtet. Währenddessen stehen die stets an Bedeutung gewinnenden Open-Access-Zeitschriften unter dem Verdacht, geringere Qualitätsmaßstäbe anzusetzen und Artikel zu publizieren, die zuvor keine oder eine weniger strenge Kontrolle durchlaufen haben. Vor diesem Hintergrund wurde für die vorliegende Arbeit eine umfassende Studie durchgeführt, die darauf abzielt, Peer-Review-Verfahren wissenschaftlicher Open-Access-Zeitschriften zu untersuchen. Unter Nutzung der durch das Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) bereitgestellten Daten wurden mehr als 3.000 Herausgeber befragt. Mit einer Rücklaufquote von mehr als 40 % können die gefundenen Ergebnisse als durchaus repräsentativ betrachtet werden. Sie zeigen deutlich, dass die meisten Open-Access-Zeitschriften Peer-Review-Verfahren einsetzen und legen außerdem nahe, dass eine große Bandbreite unterschiedlicher Verfahren und Eigenschaften von Peer Review existieren – etwa die gegenseitige Anonymität von Autoren und Gutachtern, der Informationsfluss, das Verfahren zur Auswahl der Gutachter und formale Regelungen in Bezug auf mögliche Interessenkonflikte. Dabei hängt das Aussehen eines konkreten Peer-Review-Verfahrens wesentlich von dem Wissenschaftsgebiet und der Art des Verlegers der betreffenden Zeitschrift ab. Darüber hinaus können Zusammenhänge zwischen externen Qualitätsindikatoren und Peer-Review-Eigenschaften beobachtet werden. / The present work broadly discusses the problem of quality assurance in the field of scholarly publishing. It highlights the specific characteristics resulting from electronic publishing, business models based on Open Access, and particularly Open Access Journals. Out of the different approaches for quality assessment and its fundamental purpose – filtering relevant and audited information – mainly peer review processes are examined in detail. In this context weak points and basic criticisms on peer review are enumerated and subsequently discussed with respect to known studies in this field. As a major part the present work contains a classification of peer review processes regarding different properties and its potential values. Although it has been subject to fundamental criticism for decades peer review is still widely considered to be the method of choice for pre-publication quality assurance in scholarly publishing. Meanwhile, open access journals which increasingly appear within the scholarly publication market regularly raise suspicion to follow lower quality standards and to publish articles which have passed no or less rigorous editorial examination. Against this background the present work presents a comprehensive survey which aims at analyzing peer review processes of scholarly open access journals. Using the data provided by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) more than 3.000 editors have been asked to participate. With an overall return rate of about 40 % the resulting findings can be considered as highly representative. They clearly show that most open access journals actually apply peer review processes. Moreover, the analysis indicates that there exists a broad variety of different procedures and characteristics constituting peer review, includ-ing reciprocal anonymity between authors and reviewers, information flow, the reviewer selection process, and formal settlements as for conflicts of interest. Thereby, the nature of the applied peer review process strongly depends on the scholarly discipline of the respective journal and its publisher. In addition, correlations between external quality indicators and peer review properties could be observed.

This study explores potential bias in the editorial peer-review system within the context of the field of comparative and international education. Assuming the role as “Guardian of Science” and “social status judge” (Zuckerman & Merton, 1971), peer-review, the quality control system of science, directly affects the growth of science, scientists' academic career and their institutions. The very basic tenet of the peer review system is its assumed objectivity. Bias in editorial peer review process, however, is inevitable. The constitution of the blind peer review mechanism is itself a simply undeniable acknowledgement of that fact. Therefore, this study investigated potential peer-review bias by examining the core peer-reviewed academic journal publications of the field between 1994 and 2003, through the methods of social network analysis. In addition to some descriptive analysis on the overall state of the field, based on the criterion of centrality, focus was specifically given to two networks (co-authorship network and institutional network) and the network structure for patterns that might indicate bias in terms of author, gender, author-affiliated institution, country, number of articles published and number of journals in which the author published. Findings of this research revealed no discernable patterns nor network-wide centralization in either the co-authorship network or the institution network. Thus, no reason exists to suspect the objectivity of the peer-review process of the five core academic journals of comparative and international education 1994 – 2003 on the base of centrality. Further descriptive analyses, however, did reveal patterns that may represent norms of the field and, thus, may suggest potential sources of bias. Findings indicated that 1) scholars of the field tend to research independently and publish in relative isolation, and single-authored journal articles are the norm of the field; 2) the field is dominated by the scholars and institutions of Western countries, especially the U.K and the U.S; and 3) journals of the field tend to publish more authors from the hosting countries of the journal. The implications of these findings were also discussed.

In this paper, 936 faculty free response reviews of open textbooks from the Open Textbook Library were analyzed for content and themes. The reviews were completed by faculty members at institutions in the United States and Canada. The textbooks were evaluated regarding their comprehensiveness, content accuracy, relevance longevity, clarity, consistency, modularity, organization structure flow, interface, grammatical errors, and cultural relevance. The results of the reviews found that the across 9360 comments regarding the quality of open textbooks, of these comments 97.3% reflected adequate or exceptional reviews of the textbooks. Faculty often compared the texts to traditional textbooks and in all mentions of comparison, the open textbook were regarded to be of equal or superior quality. The results of this study aid in alleviating concerns regarding quality of Open Educational Resources (OER) and provide peer reviews that faculty who consider adopting these textbooks often request. Limitations of the study and further prescriptions for research regarding OER quality and peer review research have been explored in the study.

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This essay aims to investigate four upper secondary school teachers’ perceptions of the use of peer review in English language teaching through a qualitative study. The theoretical framework of this essay includes both sociocultural theory and process theory of writing. The study itself consists of four semi-structured interviews with English teachers and the research questions aim to investigate these teachers’ motives for doing peer review, their practices involving peer review, and the perceived difficulties they have with using peer review in their language classrooms. The main findings show that while teachers think highly of peer review and believe it to be beneficial, peer review is still not an integrated method in three out of the four teachers’ practices. Some of the reasons for this included a perceived lack of time and opportunity to do peer review, as well as a lack of encouragement from their surroundings to use peer review in their classrooms. This study presents some teachers’ perceptions and practices of peer review and further discusses why teachers have these perceptions in relation to the essay’s theoretical background and previous research. Moreover, this study shows that peer review is highly thought of but rarely implemented in Swedish upper secondary schools and that peer review needs to be brought up more in the discussion of English writing if we want it to become an integrated part of English language teaching in Sweden.

This study was an examination of peer review use in English composition courses at a Japanese university. Approximately 100 students in four writing classes engaged in four modes of peer review modes: face-to-face, handwritten (both on-draft and using an evaluation sheet), and computer-assisted. The learners in the study represented a range of proficiencies, from lower-intermediate to advanced, so the assigned writing passages were limited to single paragraphs rather than full-length essays, which has typically been the case in prior research in this area. Each peer review session was preceded by training in peer review, including modeling and whole-class editing, as well as suggestions for each particular mode the learners participated in. After each session, students completed questionnaires in order to assess their evaluations of the activities, both as reviewers and comment receivers. The questionnaire data were then analyzed using a variety of statistical methods--including Rasch analysis descriptive statistics, and parametric and non-parametric measures--first to validate the questionnaire instrument, and second to ascertain the degree to which each peer review modes was viewed favorably or unfavorably received by the participants. Additionally, the participants' written drafts and peer comments were quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed in order to answer several research questions that focused on: the number and type of peer suggestions the learners made in each mode, the number and type of suggestions that were incorporated into later drafts by the authors, the degree to which suggestions and revisions were affected by learner proficiency, and the accuracy of the peer suggestions. For the research questions concerned with learner evaluations of the peer review modes, findings were mixed. The participants responded favorably to reading others' drafts and receiving comments, but they were less comfortable reviewing and making suggestions for their peers. Computer-assisted peer review was the most positively received overall, particularly from those in the High Proficiency Group. Person measures for Low Proficiency learners, on the other hand, were generally higher for on-draft peer review, while those for Intermediate Proficiency participants tended not to indicate strong endorsement for any particular mode. In order to answer the next set of research questions, the participants' drafts and peer suggestions were analyzed. Most of the learners' suggestions, particularly for those in the Low Proficiency Group, tended to be local in nature, concerning such areas as word choice, grammar, and mechanics; fewer suggestions were made at the sentence- or whole-text-level. In terms of incorporation of suggestion by authors into later drafts, oral peer review led to the highest rate of suggested revisions while review using an evaluation sheet of guided questions resulted in the lowest rate. Learner proficiency did not have a significant bearing on suggestions or revisions, except in the case of the High Proficiency Group, whose members made significantly more suggestions during computer-assisted peer review than during the other modes. Finally, over 73% of peer suggestions were determined to be accurate across all four modes. These findings indicate that peer review can work on even the most limited of scales with learners of even modest language proficiency. No single mode of peer review succeeded in all areas, and instructors are encouraged to blend different modes if possible. However, if a single mode is preferred or required, computer-assisted review is strong choice. / CITE/Language Arts

In computer science, students could benefit from exposure to critical programming concepts from multiple perspectives. Peer review is one method to allow students to experience authentic uses of the concepts in a non-programming manner. Peer review provides students with the opportunity to evaluate other people's work and, in doing so, allows for a rich learning experience. While much is known about peer review and it has many uses in other disciplines, the literature, especially in computer science, does not spend much time on the perspective of and benefits to the reviewer. In this work, we examine how to implement the peer review process in early, object-oriented, computer science courses as a way to develop the reviewers' higher-level thinking skills, increase their knowledge of specific programming concepts, and to improve attitudes to help engage them in the activity. Specifically, we explore peer review and its effects on Abstraction, Decomposition, and Encapsulation and how the type of review (students reviewing their peers or reviewing materials from their instructor), influences these effects. We also look at how the students' attitudes relate to their engagement in and the benefits from the reviews. To study these ideas, we used peer review exercises in two CS2 classes at local universities over the course of a semester. We divided the students into three groups where one group reviewed their peers, one group reviewed their instructor, and one group completed small design or coding exercises. We measured the students' attitudes and their conceptual understanding during the semester with surveys, tests, and concept maps. We collected the completed reviews as well. We found that reviewing helped students learn Decomposition, especially those reviewing the instructor's programs. We did not find evidence of improvements to the students' level of thinking over the semester nor were there significant changes in their attitudes. However, the data showed that students assigned to review their peers were less likely to complete the assignments than the other students were. Overall, peer reviews are a valuable method for teaching Decomposition to CS2 students and can be used as an alternative way to learn object-oriented programming concepts. / Ph. D.