Having students share their writing with each other is a central practice of writing courses. The process builds classroom community, allows students to practice writing for a real, live audiences, and teaches them to become more careful readers of their own writing. For many students, doing peer review is a new and intimidating task. It might also be an activity associated with less than helpful feedback. As such, devoting some class time or a homework assignment to practicing peer review on a published piece of writing can help students recognize that they do, in fact, have the skills to do this work well and that they know what kind of feedback is helpful.

Peruse this page to learn about ideas and examples of peer review used in first-year seminars at Wes.

Trading Papers

Exchanging drafts with classmates is the bread and butter of peer review. Students will come to class with a draft, share it with one or more peers, receive feedback, and use the feedback to inform their revisions. Drafts can be exchanged digitally through google docs or on Moodle forums or printed out. Instructors should guide students toward providing specific feedback — both descriptive (what does the essay say and where) as well as evaluative (does the essay work for you as a reader) — by giving specific directions or even a rubric.

After the exercise, students should engage with the feedback they received. If their work was read by two or more peers, for example, they might reflect on areas of agreement and disagreement among their readers. Alternatively, they might simply sit down with their peer reviewer and talk about their plan moving forward. They might also write a reply to their reviewer, beginning the work of clarifying their purpose and argument to their reader.

Check out the variety of ways Wesleyan faculty have asked students to do paper exchanges.

>> Thorsten Wilhelm’s google survey for peer review and google survey for reflecting on feedback.

Additional Ideas for Peer Review

>> Put students in Workshop Groups of 3-4 writers each. Students will meet with the same folks for every assignment. The logistics are as follows: Students will share their drafts with their workshop group two days before their meeting. In those two days, they must read each other’s essays and write a letter to each writer about their draft. Students then all meet for about 40 min (10 min per student) to discuss their writing and the feedback they received and brainstorm revision ideas.

>> Color Coding asks students to see their peers’ writing rather than evaluate it. Students are asked to identify specific elements of a paper, for example claim, evidence, interpretation, analysis, or explanation. Looking together at the color-coded draft, the students can reflect on possible revisions, like re-considering the balance and arrangement of its elements. Quite often, this exercise leads to a lot of questions. Students realize they don’t know what analysis means or what it looks like in writing.

>> Reverse Outlines provide descriptive feedback to students, showing them what their essay says where. Though there are a number of ways to produce a reverse outline, one fruitful strategy is to ask students to create a new document divided into two columns: “what is being communicated/content” and “why is it being said/purpose.” Starting with the last paragraph of the essay, students fill in the “what” column. Then they read from the start and fill out the “why” column.

>> Notecards and Sticky Notes can be used to help students get off the computer screen and truly re-vision their draft. Either the author of a draft or a peer transfers the main points of each paragraph onto notecards, (re-)arranges them, and adds sticky notes that either (provide transition sentences between cards or (2) explain the logic behind their arrangement. Finally the student narrates the visual of their essay as they lay the cards in turn on the table. Peers can test out different arrangements of ideas by moving notecards around and creating/discarding sticky notes as needed.

>> Class Generated Rubric Students to work in small groups to construct a grading rubric for an assignment or a revision, usually fairly late in the semester. The instructor sets the parameters: the rubrics must address the specific cognitive/learning goals of the assignment and identify features of writing of this type. After the groups come up with their rubrics, they share them and the class tries to construct ONE rubric. This requires students to make appeals, provide evidence (perhaps anecdotes about feedback received on previous papers), connect ideas, and be persuasive. Once the class arrives at a final rubric, they can exchange papers and comment based on the rubric. **This activity can also be used to construct questions for peer review.

>> Voting This exercise works best with short pieces of writing (even writing produced in class). Students put their writing around the room, with or without their names. Then they go around the room and vote for (1) the piece of writing they find the most persuasive and (2) the piece of writing they find the most interesting. When the voting is complete, scores are tallied and the winning pieces are read aloud. The class can then reflect on what made each piece the winner. What made the writing persuasive? What made the writing interesting? What writing techniques were used? Students can, finally, take five minutes to reflect on what they could do differently in their writing given this experience.