Conference, reviews and conservations about improving engineering education

Peer reviews are supposed to ensure the quality of published work and are also applied to conference papers with the same aim. But numerous studies have demonstrated that reviews cannot be considered objective or reliable. Even if they were they do not provide the opportunity to refine and develop ideas that conferences such as REES promote. We began by examining how well reviews of papers submitted to the 2010 conference of the Australasian Association for Engineering Education helped authors to improve and found them to be often inadequate. The literature reveals that this is true for peer review generally. We conclude with some suggestions for how ideas might be shared, developed and disseminated through scholarly conversation while avoiding most of the pitfalls of the review process.