Post by WIDboard on Nov 9, 2011 17:07:49 GMT -5
EWP #5: Peer Review
Hi! Welcome to the 5th installment of Essentials of Writing Pedagogy, the WIDboard original series on the teaching of writing. As always, what's presented below is meant to be informative only, and is by no means an exhaustive or mandatory approach. Take from it what you find helpful and enjoy!
__________________________________________________________________
What is Peer Review (in the undergraduate writing class)?
Many professors and graduate students will be familiar with a process called “peer review” in the context of peer-reviewed academic periodicals. In such journals, submissions are read and vetted by a cohort of experts and then accepted, rejected, or flagged for re-submission with revision. This process is not the same as peer review in the classroom context.
In the classroom context, peer review refers to a process wherein students exchange written work with one another. There is no approval committee; instead, each student is both an author and a reviewer, and the reveiw is focused on improving student writing, regardless of the current sophistication of the draft submitted for review.
Key Characteristics of Peer Review in the Classroom Setting:
Why Use Peer Review?
In short, peer review can serve three extremely useful purposes in the classroom. First, peer review promotes engaged and self-reflective learning. As Derek Malone-France puts it,
“The introduction of a public aspect of writing (even in a moderate example of peer review) has a drastic effect on learning. When [students] think about writing not just to the teacher, they become more engaged…Learning is about engagement, and making students responsible for part of it is not a bad thing—in fact it’s essential” (Malone-France).
In other words, requiring students to work not only on their own writing, but on others’ writing as well, encourages them to take an active role in the revision process—from the other side, true, but with an eye toward revision nonetheless. Suggesting changes to writing is no longer the exclusive duty of a teacher. Students become intensely engaged in thinking about what makes effective writing, instead of merely obediently inputting suggestions made by a teacher.
Second, peer review allows students to process low-stakes feedback. Students have the freedom, and in fact the responsibility, to evaluate and question the responses of peers. While teacher feedback can be or feel like an authoritative voice demanding specific action, peer feedback allows for many students a much more comfortable to ask not just How do I implement this suggestion? but also Do I agree with this suggestion, why was it made, and what would it do for my writing?.
Third, peer review can allow for efficient use of the instructor’s time, while giving a great deal of focus to individual student drafts. John C. Bean calls peer review a “timesaving strategy” when structured effectively, that can “result in genuine substantial revision” (Bean 222-3). A teacher has limited time, but if s/he “structures the sessions and trains students in what to do,” students can provide effective feedback in a timely manner (Bean 223).
Pairing/Grouping Students
Dividing students into pairs/groups for any collaborative work can be tricky, but there are a couple of particularly difficult concerns with regard to peer review.
If one student is much stronger than another
This can be a particularly tricky situation for peer review activities. Teachers fear that because part of the benefit of the assignment comes from hearing a reader’s feedback, feedback from a low-level student to a high-level student may be unhelpful. To some extent, this may be true—just as a higher-level student may be too domineering or may suggest changes that the lower-level student is not yet ready to make. That said, the problems inherent in this mismatch of ability levels actually can be headed off in advance. When setting up the goals of the peer review assignment, instructors can remember to emphasize the importance of, a) learning to think about what makes writing strong(er), b) learning to phrase your suggestions respectfully, c) understanding how/why other people read your writing as they do. In this way, even if the students’ commentary is not directly effective in terms of the suggestions rendered, the process of reviewing another’s work and reading commentary on one’s own work can still be rewarding. Instructors should encourage students to consider all peer advice carefully, whether they choose to accept it or not.
Further, it’s important for teachers to remember that “a student who is weak in one area may be strong in another” (King-Shaver and Hunter 30-31). A strong writer is not always a strong reviewer, nor is a weak writer necessarily a weak reviewer.
Pairs or Groups
Both pairing and grouping can be effective methods for peer review, but the scale of the assignment must change accordingly. The fewer reviews a student is asked to do, the more in-depth each review will probably be. If a student is asked to do several peer-reviews in a single class period, the reviews will likely be somewhat cursory. The more intensive an assignment is expected to be, the more it may be helpful to construct it as an out-of-class process.
Implications for Assignment Design
Establish Goals:
For an assignment dealing with peer review, which can often meet with student resistance, it is important to clarify goals in advance. Students should be able to answer the question Why are we doing this and what do we hope to get out of it? before the peer review exercise even begins.
Choose an Overall Approach:
An important consideration in designing peer review assignments, according to Bean, is whether the review is to be Response-Centered or Advice-Centered. Bean clarifies the differences as follows:
Clarify Expectations:
When setting up a peer review assignment, it is incredibly important for teachers to be explicit about what is expected of students. Critically, structure and training are essential to a successful peer review (Bean223). To that end, each of the following steps should be taken:
Elements of the Review:
Consider each of the following potential elements as you design your review. Though not every review assignment will have all these elements, all are commonly used in successful reviews.
Example Peer Review Assignments
“First Draft and Peer Review,” by Rachel Riedner (GWU)
widboard.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=exampleassignments&action=display&thread=104
Additional successful assignments will be posted soon, including some nontraditional assignments.
Additional Resources for Peer Review:
No One Writes Alone: Peer Review in the Classroom, A Guide For Students
(Student-focused video by MIT)
techtv.mit.edu/genres/25-humanities-arts-and-social-sciences/videos/14629-no-one-writes-alone-peer-review-in-the-classroom-a-guide-for-students
No One Writes Alone: Peer Review in the Classroom, A Guide For Instructors
(Instructor-focused video by MIT)
techtv.mit.edu/genres/25-humanities-arts-and-social-sciences/videos/14628-no-one-writes-alone-peer-review-in-the-classroom-a-guide-for-instructors
Works Cited
Bean, John C. Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996. Print.
King-Shaver, Barbara, and Alyce Hunter. Differentiated Instruction in the English Classroom. Portsmouth, NH: Henemann, 2003. Print.
Malone-France, Derek. “How to Run a Successful Peer Review Group.” The George Washington University. Academic Center, Foggy Bottom Campus, Washington, D.C. 14 Oct. 2011. Graduate Student Workshop.
Hi! Welcome to the 5th installment of Essentials of Writing Pedagogy, the WIDboard original series on the teaching of writing. As always, what's presented below is meant to be informative only, and is by no means an exhaustive or mandatory approach. Take from it what you find helpful and enjoy!
__________________________________________________________________
What is Peer Review (in the undergraduate writing class)?
Many professors and graduate students will be familiar with a process called “peer review” in the context of peer-reviewed academic periodicals. In such journals, submissions are read and vetted by a cohort of experts and then accepted, rejected, or flagged for re-submission with revision. This process is not the same as peer review in the classroom context.
In the classroom context, peer review refers to a process wherein students exchange written work with one another. There is no approval committee; instead, each student is both an author and a reviewer, and the reveiw is focused on improving student writing, regardless of the current sophistication of the draft submitted for review.
Key Characteristics of Peer Review in the Classroom Setting:
- Mutual—Students both review and submit work for review. Students are truly peers; though students will differ in ability level or readiness, no student should have authority over another in the peer review process.
- Low-Stakes—While students may receive grades/credit for the work that they do in reviewing, no student’s commentary determines the grade for the student being reviewed.
- Revision-Focused—While professional peer reviewers may make categorical judgments of “accepted” or “rejected,” student peer reviews should focus instead on success and failures of the piece in question, and on how to improve future writing.
Why Use Peer Review?
In short, peer review can serve three extremely useful purposes in the classroom. First, peer review promotes engaged and self-reflective learning. As Derek Malone-France puts it,
“The introduction of a public aspect of writing (even in a moderate example of peer review) has a drastic effect on learning. When [students] think about writing not just to the teacher, they become more engaged…Learning is about engagement, and making students responsible for part of it is not a bad thing—in fact it’s essential” (Malone-France).
In other words, requiring students to work not only on their own writing, but on others’ writing as well, encourages them to take an active role in the revision process—from the other side, true, but with an eye toward revision nonetheless. Suggesting changes to writing is no longer the exclusive duty of a teacher. Students become intensely engaged in thinking about what makes effective writing, instead of merely obediently inputting suggestions made by a teacher.
Second, peer review allows students to process low-stakes feedback. Students have the freedom, and in fact the responsibility, to evaluate and question the responses of peers. While teacher feedback can be or feel like an authoritative voice demanding specific action, peer feedback allows for many students a much more comfortable to ask not just How do I implement this suggestion? but also Do I agree with this suggestion, why was it made, and what would it do for my writing?.
Third, peer review can allow for efficient use of the instructor’s time, while giving a great deal of focus to individual student drafts. John C. Bean calls peer review a “timesaving strategy” when structured effectively, that can “result in genuine substantial revision” (Bean 222-3). A teacher has limited time, but if s/he “structures the sessions and trains students in what to do,” students can provide effective feedback in a timely manner (Bean 223).
Pairing/Grouping Students
Dividing students into pairs/groups for any collaborative work can be tricky, but there are a couple of particularly difficult concerns with regard to peer review.
If one student is much stronger than another
This can be a particularly tricky situation for peer review activities. Teachers fear that because part of the benefit of the assignment comes from hearing a reader’s feedback, feedback from a low-level student to a high-level student may be unhelpful. To some extent, this may be true—just as a higher-level student may be too domineering or may suggest changes that the lower-level student is not yet ready to make. That said, the problems inherent in this mismatch of ability levels actually can be headed off in advance. When setting up the goals of the peer review assignment, instructors can remember to emphasize the importance of, a) learning to think about what makes writing strong(er), b) learning to phrase your suggestions respectfully, c) understanding how/why other people read your writing as they do. In this way, even if the students’ commentary is not directly effective in terms of the suggestions rendered, the process of reviewing another’s work and reading commentary on one’s own work can still be rewarding. Instructors should encourage students to consider all peer advice carefully, whether they choose to accept it or not.
Further, it’s important for teachers to remember that “a student who is weak in one area may be strong in another” (King-Shaver and Hunter 30-31). A strong writer is not always a strong reviewer, nor is a weak writer necessarily a weak reviewer.
Pairs or Groups
Both pairing and grouping can be effective methods for peer review, but the scale of the assignment must change accordingly. The fewer reviews a student is asked to do, the more in-depth each review will probably be. If a student is asked to do several peer-reviews in a single class period, the reviews will likely be somewhat cursory. The more intensive an assignment is expected to be, the more it may be helpful to construct it as an out-of-class process.
Implications for Assignment Design
Establish Goals:
For an assignment dealing with peer review, which can often meet with student resistance, it is important to clarify goals in advance. Students should be able to answer the question Why are we doing this and what do we hope to get out of it? before the peer review exercise even begins.
Choose an Overall Approach:
An important consideration in designing peer review assignments, according to Bean, is whether the review is to be Response-Centered or Advice-Centered. Bean clarifies the differences as follows:
- Response-Centered Reviews place “maximum responsibility on the writer for making decisions about what to change…[the reviewer] explains to the writer what he or she liked or did not like, what worked and what didn’t work, what was confusing, and so forth” (Bean 223). It is the writer’s job, then, to interpret that feedback and determine what steps might be taken to address those issues, if any. This may be more appropriate for freer-form assignments or for earlier drafts/stages of a particular project when overarching concepts are more important.
- Advice-Centered Reviews, on the other hand, focus on providing specific suggestions for improving the piece, and provide a bit more directed guidance to the student (Bean 224). This may be more appropriate for writing assignments with very specific directives (Bean 224) or for later, more finalized drafts.
Clarify Expectations:
When setting up a peer review assignment, it is incredibly important for teachers to be explicit about what is expected of students. Critically, structure and training are essential to a successful peer review (Bean223). To that end, each of the following steps should be taken:
- Create/distribute an explicit assignment sheet. Clarify exactly what is to be done when, especially if the peer review assignment is an out-of class review. Print deadlines/modes of submission if applicable.
- Model what a peer review response might look like, either on an overhead projector, a classroom board, a photocopied text from a previous or teacher-created assignment. Consider collaborating as a class on reviewing 1-2 paragraphs of a paper together, especially if you an project it on the board. This is indispensible if the students have not yet done peer review in the class.
- Prioritize what you’d like students to focus on. Consider discussing the Orders of Problems (EWP #2) in some form, or simply suggesting important focus areas.
- Emphasize respectful commentary, including the use of “I” statements when possible, and the importance of pointing out successes along with failures. This expectation, though seemingly obvious, is important to clarify; because students may overlook it if it is not made very clear.
- Convey grading/evaluation criteria that will be used to assess their work in reviews. If you’re using a rubric, consider supplying them with a copy.
Elements of the Review:
Consider each of the following potential elements as you design your review. Though not every review assignment will have all these elements, all are commonly used in successful reviews.
- Guiding Questions for reviewers, either to be explicitly answered one-by-one, or simply to inform their feedback.
- A Review Letter, written by the reviewer to the writer, giving narrative commentary and suggestions instead of simply marginal notes (highly recommended for all outside-of-class peer reviews). A copy of this letter should be delivered both to the writer and to the instructor. In a short in-class review, this could be a simple one-paragraph response, but in more substantial assignments longer letters (1-2 pages) are appropriate.
- Review Rubrics for reviewers to evaluate the assignment based on a number of major criteria, similar to the grading rubric the professor will use.
- A Face-to-Face Conference after the reviewer has read the paper. This will force students to sit down and talk about the work, in addition to writing to one another. Some students process feedback best through speaking, so this can be an important element. Consider instructing students to begin conferences by reading aloud their letters to one another. Students should conference on one paper at a time.
- A Self-Reflective Response on how the peer review process went, including personal reactions to both ends of the process, and how it was helpful or not in meeting the goals set out at the beginning of the period.
- Reviewer evaluations to communicate to professor how helpful and/or thorough a partner was (also helps to ensure good-faith effort by all parties).
- Web-Based Components: For multi-reviewer assignments done out of class, it can be very useful to conduct some reviewing procedures through Blackboard, wikis, blogs, or the like. Using such tools, students will be able to feed off of one another’s work, contribute to a growing response instead of a static one, and leave a catalogue for future classes to model themselves on.
Example Peer Review Assignments
“First Draft and Peer Review,” by Rachel Riedner (GWU)
widboard.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=exampleassignments&action=display&thread=104
Additional successful assignments will be posted soon, including some nontraditional assignments.
Additional Resources for Peer Review:
No One Writes Alone: Peer Review in the Classroom, A Guide For Students
(Student-focused video by MIT)
techtv.mit.edu/genres/25-humanities-arts-and-social-sciences/videos/14629-no-one-writes-alone-peer-review-in-the-classroom-a-guide-for-students
No One Writes Alone: Peer Review in the Classroom, A Guide For Instructors
(Instructor-focused video by MIT)
techtv.mit.edu/genres/25-humanities-arts-and-social-sciences/videos/14628-no-one-writes-alone-peer-review-in-the-classroom-a-guide-for-instructors
Works Cited
Bean, John C. Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996. Print.
King-Shaver, Barbara, and Alyce Hunter. Differentiated Instruction in the English Classroom. Portsmouth, NH: Henemann, 2003. Print.
Malone-France, Derek. “How to Run a Successful Peer Review Group.” The George Washington University. Academic Center, Foggy Bottom Campus, Washington, D.C. 14 Oct. 2011. Graduate Student Workshop.