Peer review, does it motivate or discourage?

ID constructivist increasingly advocate the practice of peer review and assessment but does it really work in practice? Does it promote higher order thinking in the reviewer and can the reviewee take the feedback and use it to improve current or future work? Is it enough to wrap up another students work or should the review include constructive criticism?

Both of my units this semester required peer review of proposals. Word count recommendations were 500 for one and 100 for the other. I found the longer review required much more thinking and research especially in unfamiliar subject areas. I tried to give constructive comments and feedback along with references I though might help the anonymous author. I learnt a lot from the exercise. When I received the anonymous reviews for my paper however I was a little disappointed. Whether my disappointment was valid or not is another matter, the fact remains I felt a little cheated considering the amount of effort I put into my own reviews. My point is that peer review needs to be facilitated well with proper guidelines about length, content, expected research. This peer review is mandatory and assessed.

As for the shorter 'wrap-up', I'm not sure what the instructional value of this exercise was given the low word count guideline. It is not assessed or mandatory although recommended. Also, we were not told which paper to 'wrap-up' so some writers were left without wrappers. This presumably left some authors disappointed that there papers were 'ignored' which can't be good for motivation. The facilitator did send a friendly reminder to try and rectify this but doubtful whether the reminder will have a 100% success rate.

In mu course design I will carefully consider my peer review experiences as well as the audience when including this concept as a learning activity.