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Peer Review of Student Writing
The Writing Program advocates peer review of student writing as a particularly valuable form of collaborative learning. Peer review fosters critical reading skills, promotes the internalization of editing and revising techniques, builds a sense of community in the classroom, and helps students develop a more distinct sense of audience for their writing. Some instructors make it a practice never to be the first person to read a student essay. Yet for peer review to work effectively, it is important for the instructor to model appropriate responses to writing in class before asking students to comment on one another's work. Distributing an essay from a previous semester in order to demonstrate effective forms of response can help prevent unproductive peer reviews. 
General Principles:
  1. It is important to model useful responses to student writing before asking students to respond to one another's work. Train students to engage with one another's ideas. By default many students will try simply to edit one another's sentences.
     
  2. It is important to provide students with a specific set of guidelines for peer reviews. Several examples are available on other webpages on this site. Return to the previous page for a list.
     
  3. Train students to support all comments with examples from the draft; precision is key when giving advice.
     
  4. To encourage students to take the task of reviewing seriously, you should evaluate the peer reviews (a simple check/plus/minus system along with a few brief comments is sufficient), particularly early in the semester. It is also useful to refer to peer reviews in your evaluative comments of final drafts: e.g., "You would have done well to take Jenni's advice to recast your introduction. . . ."
     
  5. Don't expect students to help each other very effectively with matters of style or sentence structure; most students tend not to see such problems very well in someone else's writing and they tend to offer vague advice. (Doesn't hurt to make them try from time to time, however.)
     
  6. Peer reviews can be advice-centered or response-centered. Advice-centered reviews offer specific suggestions for revision. Response-centered reviews simply offer the reader's response to the essay without offering advice. Both approaches work; examples appear below.
     
  7. Advice-centered reviews should have two components: first a descriptive section (e.g., "Locate and paraphrase the author's thesis and main pieces of evidence); then an evaluative section (e.g., "Identify the author's most effective use of evidence and say why it is effective; identify the author's least effective use of evidence and say why.") The descriptive section ensures that readers have made an effort to understand the essay before offering advice.

    Models for Implementing Peer Review:

    I. In-class Peer Reviews:
    Organizing in-class peer reviews. The loss of class time to peer review is usually offset by gains in student writing. There are many ways to organize peer reviews in class. Students bring in several copies of a thesis statement, first paragraph, prospectus or entire essay. The instructor places students in groups of 4-5 (if they'll be reading only a sentence or paragraph) or groups of 2-3 (if they'll be reading entire drafts) and distributes peer review sheets telling them precisely what to do. Students read the drafts and then fill out review sheets (see previous pages for a list of examples), handing them back to the writers; the writers keep these and hand them in along with the next draft. Or the students can fill out the sheets, return them to the author, and take turns discussing each essay. Whether or not they discuss depends on how much time you want to allot to the review and how much they have to read (a thesis statement versus a whole draft). You may also choose to require students to exchange essays the night before class meets in order to give them more time to read, but it takes some doing to ensure that students actually make the exchange. The following examples are adapted from John C. Bean, Engaging Ideas: The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996). Any of the review sheets indexed on the previous page could also be integrated into these models. 
    A response-centered review. This approach shifts responsibility to the writer for making decisions about how to revise. The writer may well receive contradictory advice and will have to decide what he or she thinks will work best.
    1. Divide the class into groups of four.
    2. The writer distributes copies of his or her paper to the rest of the group and then reads the draft aloud. (Better than silent group reading: the performance and listening jump-starts the collaborative process.) 
    3. Group members should make only minimal reminder marks (e.g., a wavy line) while listening. Then they take 5 minutes or so to take notes. You might devise a simple review sheet for this purpose: one model uses three columns headed + (for noting what worked), - (for negative responses), and ? for questions about blurry spots, undeveloped sections, or the like.
    4. The group takes turns, one by one, explaining what they did or didn't like, what was unclear, what did or didn't work. They don't offer advice; they simply give their personal responses.
    5. The writer simply takes notes. Some models prohibit the writer from responding in order to ward off defensiveness and to keep the process moving. The downside is that the writers don't participate in the give and take that sometimes helps them discover what they really meant to say. A compromise would permit the writers to respond only after all responses have been delivered.
    6. Repeat the process for the rest of the group. 
    An advice-centered review. The following procedure combines advice with collaborative reviewing and works best when the instructor has effectively communicated the goals of the assignment.
    1. Divide the class into pairs, and ask each pair to exchange drafts with another pair.

    2. The students in each pair collaborate to compose a written review for each of the two drafts from the other pair. The review should be guided by a checklist or form of some kind. The more complex or lengthy your checklist, the more you should consider having the papers read before class meets. Here's one possible checklist:

      1. Write out the writer's thesis statement. (If it is hard to find, help the writer clarify what he or she is trying to accomplish in the essay.)
      2. Mark in the margins any unclear or confusing passage.
      3. Write out your assessment of the strengths or weaknesses of the ideas in the essay. Do you agree or disagree with parts of the essay? How might others respond to the ideas?
      4. Look back over the draft looking for quality of support. Are all claims sufficiently backed up? Are enough details offered? Should more research be done?
      5. Write out at least two things that you think work best in this draft.
      6. Make two to three specific suggestions for revision.
    3. The pairs hand back the papers to the writers. Time permitting, the pairs can also discuss their reviews.
    II. Out-of-class Peer Reviews
    This procedure simply adapts the in-class model, giving the reviewers more time to read and write and leaving more class time for other forms of instruction.
    1. Divide the class into pairs, and have each pair exchange drafts with another pair.
    2. Each pair meets outside of class to write their collaborative reviews (guided by your review sheet) and then returns them to the writers in class.