Why Include Peer Review in Your Course?

Writers need feedback on their writing in order to improve. While instructor feedback is valuable, request students to answer to each other's writing provides additional opportunities for before-the-borderline feedback without increasing the instructor's workload.

In that location are other benefits to peer review, as well: Peer review fosters students' awareness of their ain and others' writing processes and approaches to the writing job. It gives students practice assessing their own and others' writing and can reinforce course-specific criteria for writing assignments. Moreover, past both giving and receiving disquisitional feedback, peer review teaches valuable skills like listening, evaluating, responding, and reflecting. Incorporating peer review in your grade allows students to gain multiple perspectives on their writing, mimicking the process of peer review in professional noesis production. Finally, having students engage in active dialogue about their intentions and ideas contributes to a collaborative classroom community.

Simply Don't Most Students Hate Peer Review?

Peer review sometimes has a bad reputation. Some students (and instructors) view peer review as unproductive because they've received advice that's too squeamish or too vague to exist helpful, likewise disquisitional to be constructive, or besides focused on surface-level editing issues rather than content. You lot can overcome these negative perceptions past finer structuring peer review as a regular grade component.

What are Best Practices for Peer Review?

To ensure that peer review benefits both the writer and the reader and leads to substantial revision, instructors demand to set basis rules. Beginning, the basics:

  • Peer review can be conducted in or out of course, in-person or electronically
  • Peer review can be conducted in pairs or groups (many writing scholars recommend groups of 3-4)
  • Peer review can exist conducted in any number of ways, from having students exchange papers in class to using peer review programs like SWoRD.
  • Peer review will demand to happen more than in one case for students to gain do and fluency
  • Peer review should be conducted at to the lowest degree several days before the last submission deadline, to give students enough time brand large-calibration revisions
  • Provide clear parameters and require a deliverable, eastward.grand., a grade / handout or a letter to the writer
  • Provide coaching and guidance to aid students become meliorate peer reviewers

Two female undergraduate students working on peer review.

Instructors should gear up students for peer review by discussing your expectations with the class: What makes feedback helpful or unhelpful? What meaningful feedback tin writers take from their readers? What criteria should be used to review papers in this course? Consider providing examples or models of the kind of feedback you'd like students to provide.

Effective peer review is a guided, structured process. You'll need to provide students with focused tasks or criteria. Encourage them to consider their drafts every bit "works-in-progress" and prompt them to utilise description rather than evaluative language. For example:

Instead of "Does the paper have a thesis argument" endeavour "In but one to two sentences, state what position you think the writer is taking. Place stars around the sentence that you retrieve presents the thesis."

Instead of "Is the paper clearly organized?" endeavour "On the back of this sheet, brand an outline of the paper."

Instead of "Is the paper conspicuously written" try "Highlight (in any colour) any passages you lot had to read more than once to sympathize what the author was saying."

Students should likewise betoken at least i thing their peer's writing is doing well. Students aren't always aware of what'due south working in their texts, and then having peers provide positive feedback helps them gain insight into readers' responses.

Instructors can foster metacognition and agency in the writing procedure past asking writers to prepare memos for their reviewers that contain a cursory summary of the paper'southward argument and questions pertaining to the current bug they're struggling with, e.g., "How persuasive is my argument? What additional testify could I incorporate? Does my paragraph on p. 2 seem too long?"

Finally, for peer review to work, instructors will need to teach revision and talk with students near how to handle constructive criticism. Often, students make changes related to "depression-hanging fruit"—wrong words, missed citations—and avert taking on larger revision challenges, similar restructuring a newspaper or incorporating more persuasive evidence. Those larger changes can be daunting. Remind students that yous care more than about macro-level issues similar content, structure, and genre conventions. You might ask students to write a memo or reflection summarizing their peer review feedback: What revision tasks will they prioritize? What will be most time-consuming? How will they take steps to address the most challenging or time-consuming revision tasks?

You might even share your ain strategies for taking on large-calibration revision tasks!

Additional Resource:

  • Making Peer Review Piece of work, University of Wisconsin-Madison
    • Includes full general guidelines and a model for structuring peer review
  • Using Pupil Peer Review, WAC Clearinghouse, for more data about:
    • Planning for peer review
    • Helping students offer effective feedback
    • Providing guidance on using feedback
    • Sample peer review sheets
  • Edible bean, J. (2011). Engaging Ideas: The Professor'due south Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Agile Learning in the Classroom. twond Ed., Chapter fifteen, "Coaching the Writing Process and Handling the Newspaper Load"

Related Links:

  • Responding to Educatee Writing
  • Incorporating Feedback
  • Revising