Best Practices for Teaching Students to Peer Reviews Each Others Writing Online?

Why utilise peer review in my classes?

Peer review, also chosen peer editing, peer feedback, and formative peer assessment, allows students to provide and receive feedback on an assignment before submitting it to the teacher. When students give and get peer feedback on an assignment in progress, they can remind each other of assignment goals and criteria, become a sense of how readers might reply to their writing when those readers aren't mark their piece of work, then brand targeted changes to improve their assignments earlier submitting or presenting them. In this manner, peer review takes some of the instruction and feedback load away from the instructor. Along the way, students enhance necessary workplace skills like giving and receiving feedback.

How do I assign peer review?

Peer review can be carried out in-class or out-of-class through paired or pocket-sized-group guided critiques of a draft or early version of an assignment. You tin provide a handout or set of instructions to students that is tailored to the consignment or to the class, similar this guide from the Writing and Communication Heart. If y'all accept a large class, software like PEAR is invaluable for managing the logistics of peer review.

How can I make peer review work well?

Giving useful feedback to peers is a skill that can be developed through guidance and practice. If you lot've ever received vague (at all-time) or fell (at worst) reviews of your own work, you know: the ability to provide constructive, honest critique isn't innate. Here are some ideas for pedagogy students how to provide valuable responses to each other—and to make use of the responses they receive.

Provide guiding questions or tasks to students

Students rarely know where to brainstorm when providing feedback on their peers' projects and assignments. To assistance students spring in, specify review tasks or questions you lot want them to reply about each other'southward work.

Direct but open up-ended questions work all-time. Questions that permit reviewers to mirror dorsum to their peers what they've read or seen tin be highly productive. Questions like, "What is the central claim of this paper, in your opinion?" or "What information did you find virtually convincing in this report and why?" or "What sections were most interesting to y'all on this poster and why?" can help students run across how readers will understand their work—or not.

Critical questions that lead to deportment are ideal. Questions like "What spots were most confusing to you in this report and what would make them clearer?" or "Which aspects of this proposal did you wish y'all could hear more about?" or "If this were your project, what is 1 thing you would do to revise it?" direct students in their critical feedback and nudge them to propose follow-upwards actions for their peers.

You might too direct students to behave out tasks like generating an outline from their peer's paper to demonstrate to the author how a reader might understand the organisation of the newspaper or to use the assignment rubric to conduct an artificial evaluation of the assignment.

Finally, students benefit from directly tasks as reviewees as well equally reviewers. To that terminate, guide students to accept notes as they discuss their work with their peers or to include a memo when they submit their assignments in which they draw changes they fabricated as a outcome of the feedback they received from their peers.

Teach students how to review rather than edit

Peer review that is focused on content and structure of an consignment in progress is the most beneficial for students since sentence-level editing is more productive as a final editing step. To teach students how to provide useful review comments rather than editing their peers' piece of work, using a handout or ready of questions to guide the process is essential.

Students also practise well with talking about the benefits of peer review and having a voice in the process. In accelerate of a peer review activeness, conduct an action or discussion with students to generate "dos and don'ts" or best practices so that students take ownership of their peer review. When asked, students will say that they find information technology frustrating when their peers only edit grammatical errors or say that an consignment is "fine." Saying these frustrations aloud in advance of a peer review session will help students resist the urge to make these less-helpful responses to their peers and prompt them to provide more useful comments on organisation, structure, content, or style.

When possible, deport peer review sessions in grade

One of the benefits of conducting peer reviews as an in-class activity rather than an online assignment is that students learn to see readers and viewers of their piece of work as human beings with authentic responses. When doing peer review in person, surface-level editing becomes less valuable than a meaningful word of ideas or system.

Many instructors implementing peer review assume that blind review is ideal, merely recent research on anonymous peer review tells us otherwise. A study on peer review in English language linguistic communication learning courses showed that, although anonymizing the peer review process tin can assist less advanced students give more thorough critiques to their classmates, anonymization makes no difference to the kind of feedback more than avant-garde students provide (Garner and Hadingham, 2019). Since discussing ideas with peers is so useful, consider anonymizing merely the offset round of peer review each term until students gain more than confidence with the process and can conduct out meaningful in-person conversations about their work in progress.

Do peer review more than than once in a term

Because peer review is a skill that can be developed, conveying out peer review activities 3 or 4 times in a twelve-week term is ideal. The first time students conduct peer review, they volition crave a lot of guidance, and their feedback volition be less useful. By their tertiary or fourth round, students are more than comfortable and confident and, as a result, they provide richer responses to each other. At the same time, with multiple opportunities to give and receive feedback, students run into for themselves the benefits of incorporating advice from their peers on their assignments; rather than seeing peer review every bit "brand-work," they invest their energy in what they now know is a worthwhile activity.

Resource

CTE Didactics Tips

• Methods for Assessing Group Piece of work
• Responding to Writing Assignments: Managing the Paper Load

Other Resources

• For more than ideas on preparing peer review guides for different assignments and disciplines, forming peer review groups, and preparing students to succeed with peer review, run into this serial of Peer Review Resources from the University of Wisconsin–Madison Writing Across the Curriculum program.
• For suggestions for every stride of incorporating peer review into your classes, see this detailed resource on Planning and Guiding In-Class Peer Review from Washington University in St. Louis.
• To guide students through steps and practices for successful peer review, consider adapting some of these materials:
  • a comprehensive Guide to the Theory and Practise of Peer Review from Waterloo's Writing and Communication Centre
  • a Peer Critiques Handout from the Academy of Michigan
  • a series of targeted Peer Review Sheets from Brandeis University
• For big classes, apply peer review software similar PEAR. Contact your CTE Liaison to learn more.

Further Reading

• Corbett, Southward. J., LaFrance, M., & Decker, T. E. (2014). Peer pressure, peer ability: Theory and exercise in peer review and response for the writing classroom. Southlake, TX: Fountainhead Printing.
• Garner, J., & Hadingham, O. (2019). Anonymizing the Peer Response Process: An Effective Way to Increase Proposed Revisions?. Journal of Response to Writing, 5(one). Retrieved from https://journalrw.org/index.php/jrw/article/view/141
• Nilson, L. B. (2003). Improving Student Peer Feedback. College Teaching, 51(1), 34-38. doi:10.1080/87567550309596408
• Topping, K. J. (2009). Peer Cess. Theory Into Practice, 48(i), twenty-27. doi:10.1080/00405840802577569
• Vickerman, P. (2009). Student perspectives on determinative peer assessment: An attempt to deepen learning? Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 34(2), 221-230. doi:x.1080/02602930801955986

 This Creative Eatables license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon our work non-commercially, as long as they credit the states and indicate if changes were made. Utilise this citation format:Using Student Peer Review in Whatever Class. Center for Teaching Excellence, University of Waterloo .

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