The use of peer review exists at many levels in education.

In my classes, I consistently use peer review for drafting during the writing process. It works, but why it works is the important part.

Students who have agency in their academic career, in the projects that they choose, in the subjects that they write about, are more successful. A system designed around student agency exists, but it is underutilized on a broad basis.

“There is something deeply wrong about the fact that Montessori is still a niche movement in education over a century after its birth. This is a catastrophe for the obvious reasons—all the human potential wasted by subpar education when better alternatives have been available—but also because our collective blindness reveals something deeply rotten at the heart of our collective culture.” https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2018/06/29/montessori-schools-are-exceptionally-successful-so-why-arent-there-more

If we want students to invest in their own education, and invest in the education of others, we need recursive assessment. The programs that do this most successfully are Montessori, project-based, and inquiry-based programs.

“Children in Montessori performed better or the same on every measure, never worse. To wit, at age 5, they performed better than waitlisted controls on the Woodcock-Johnson Letter-Word, Word Attack, and Applied Problems subtests, and on tests of executive function, social problem-solving, and social cognition.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10648-019-09483-3

If educators are sincerely interested in closing the achievement gap, investing the time and attention to these types of programs is the way to do it:

“Of particular interest, children in the lower income half of the sample who were in Montessori significantly closed the achievement gap with higher income children by the end of the study.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10648-019-09483-3

As educators create classrooms and curriculum where students can choose their own adventure, use their peers for critique and understanding, and find intrinsic satisfaction, students will grow as citizens of the world as well as scholars.