Building Critical Thinkers with AI Literacy Through Peer Review

As generative AI becomes part of how students research, write, revise, and solve problems, simply teaching students how to use AI is not enough.

Students also need the ability to question AI outputs, evaluate information, explain their reasoning, and make thoughtful decisions about when AI should or should not be used.

On October 28, Francine Guice from Oakland University and Khalifa Salisu from Kritik hosted Building Critical Thinkers with AI Literacy Through Peer Review, a practical conversation on how peer review and AI literacy can work together to strengthen critical thinking in higher education.

The session explored how peer review can move beyond giving feedback on a finished assignment and become a structured learning experience where students compare ideas, evaluate evidence, identify weaknesses, and reflect on the quality of both human- and AI-supported work.

By engaging students as reviewers, instructors can help them become more thoughtful writers, more critical users of AI, and more confident decision-makers.

In this session, participants explored how to:

• Build critical thinking through peer review by asking students to evaluate reasoning, evidence, and quality rather than simply correct mistakes.
• Develop AI literacy by helping students question, verify, and reflect on AI-generated information.
• Strengthen evaluative judgment as students learn to recognize what makes work effective, credible, and aligned with course expectations.
• Encourage responsible AI use by shifting the focus from whether AI was used to how students used it and what decisions they made.
• Make student thinking more visible through explanation, feedback, reflection, and comparison.
• Create more active learning experiences where students learn from one another instead of relying only on instructor feedback.
• Scale meaningful feedback without adding an unsustainable grading burden for instructors.

Francine also shared practical perspectives from her own courses on using peer review to help students engage more deeply with course content while developing the judgment and AI literacy they will increasingly need in academic and professional environments.

Access the Workshop Resources

If you missed the live session or would like to revisit the materials, fill out the form on this page to access the workshop resources.

The resources will help you explore practical ways to incorporate peer assessment, peer feedback, critical thinking, and AI literacy into your own courses.

Fill out the form to access the workshop resources.

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