English teachers seeking a way of giving feedback before students
submit papers for a grade often turn to peer review. In effect,
these teachers use peer reviewers to give formative
assessment to other students.
Note: Make
sure peer review is an appropriate feedback method in your teaching
writing situation.
In classroom settings, peer review should be a supportive
activity, not a judgmental one. For a peer review
to be useful, both the author and the reviewer must understand
what topics need to be covered and which should be avoided.
In my first-year college composition classes that required peer
reviews, the reviews worked poorly when
students thought they had to rewrite the paper they were
reading. (Some English teachers also confuse giving feedback with
correcting papers.)
Reviews worked well both in person and online when students looked
at five elements that mean the difference between the author
getting a decent grade and lousy one.
1) Does the paper follow directions?
Students are uniquely qualified for giving feedback to other
class members on this first topic because they know what the
directions for the assignment were. If Caitlin thinks Joshua
didn't follow directions, one or the other of them will have a
learning experience.
2) Is the paper unified?
A unified essay is unified around a thesis statement. It
is impossible for peer reviewers to tell if an essay is unified
unless they can correctly identify the paper's thesis.
Train your students to write out the thesis when they are
the readers. Putting on paper what they understood the author to
say forces readers to make an effort to understand the author.
Moreover, if the readers have to write the thesis, neither author
nor reader can resort to saying, "You know what I mean"
to cover their embarrassment.
If the peer reviewer can't identify the author's thesis, the
problem is the writer not the reader. Writers' must make their
points clearly.
The peer review ends if the reader cannot identify a thesis.
3) Is the paper coherent?
Peer reviewers are not going to talk to authors about coherence.
They'll say things like, "I wasn't sure how this sentence
is related to your point."
The writers must make their theses and topic sentences unambigious
or a paper cannot be coherent.
The peer reviewer doesn't need to fix anything
in the paper. The peer reviewer merely lets the author know something
needs to be fixed.
4) Is the evidence convincing?
The student reader substitutes for the author's audience in giving
feedback about whether the evidence the writer presented is convincing.
Peer readers can note how the people and organizations the author
mentions in each paragraph. If no source is mentioned,
the reader can ask specifically, "What is your source for
this information?"
A classmate can also identify where the writer should tweak the
paper to make the relevance of the evidence clear.
Perhaps the writer forgot to mention the source's credentials.
Or perhaps the writer failed to explain how the evidence supports
the thesis.
It is easier for a peer reviewer to spot those kinds of problems
than for the author to see them.
5) Is the organization clear?
Beginning writers are likely to have organizational problems because
they had overlapping points in their writing skeletons™.
They may not see the problem until a reader giving feedback points
out that they have redundant information.
Students will accept that verdict far more readily from a classmate
than they will from you. If you tell them they said the same thing
three times, they'll get huffy and say it's your fault: if you didn't
require such long papers, they wouldn't have to write so much.
For peer reviewers, the hardest part of giving feedback in this
manner is writing out the thesis statement.
The hardest part your job may be convincing students that peer
reviewers accomplish their jobs by giving feedback even if that
feedback is that they cannot identify the author's thesis.
