Peer-Editing/Review

Reviewing a peer’s work can help students learn how others organize and interpret information. In addition, it often serves as a valuable form of feedback that doesn’t add to your feedback workload as an instructor. Online classes benefit peer-review in that students have plenty of time to review each other’s work and provide feedback (rather than trying to hurry through reading during a face-to-face class session).

You can set up a peer review system which is anonymous or allow students to create pairs. Encouraging the use of a rubric in the review will provide additional insight for both students.

Peer-review is easy to set up as an added option on Canvas assignments. You can also view students’ responses to one another if you would like to grade students’ peer-reviews.

Peer-review does require some work on the front end to “train” students how to respond to one another in a useful and effective way. Providing students guidance on how to review each other’s work is absolutely vital to the success of a peer-review activity.

Some opinions from students about peer-review can include the following:

  • “I’m really not comfortable having other people read my writing.”
  • “How can I provide suggestions for other people to improve their writing when I’m a horrible writer myself?”
  • “Peer-Review is a waste of time.”
  • “Their paper is so good there wasn’t anything to improve.”

Every one of these statements has merit and stems from the fundamental difficulty of both offering our writing up to others for critique and critiquing.

Here is some information to share with your students in peer-review prompts/instructions:

  • You are all qualified to provide peer feedback because you’re all working on the same type of assignment.
  • Every piece of writing can be improved. Writing is a recursive process: you cycle through and return to the different stages of writing (invention, drafting, revision, and editing) throughout the creation of a document, which means that unlike a math problem, there is no solve for x equation to the creation of a good document. It takes time, revision, and effort. Getting outside feedback on your thoughts helps you to move beyond your own preconceived notions of something and create a document that is versatile and rich with perspective.
  • No matter how good a document seems to you, there is something that can be improved–even if it’s just specific word choices.
  • Providing comments like: “The essay is great, I wouldn’t change anything! :D” is not helpful. Your peer is going to see that and disagree with you. They know that things could be improved, but they don’t see how. They’re relying on you to help them do that. Telling them it’s great doesn’t help them do anything.
  • Be specific! If you say something like: “Your intro could use some work” it’s vital that you follow that up with what exactly is missing from the intro and an example of how you would fix it.
  • You are not encouraged to provide grammatical feedback as fixing grammar is an “editing” task that comes last after larger revisions. Many people aren’t comfortable with spotting and explaining errors and so can offer misleading information.

In Canvas, you can provide the same grading rubric used to evaluate the essay/writing in the peer-review activity. It’s helpful as well to provide a list of questions for students to focus their feedback efforts. Those questions will be specifically focused on the type of paper you’ve assigned.

Additional Resources