Not all feedback is equally influential. The best peer feedback gets at the questions of where am I going? How am I getting there? And where do I go next? One way to get students to focus on these questions is to consider the principles of peer review and construct your peer review around them.
This page covers the peer review process from important principles to consider when using peer review your classes, potential benefits for students, creating frameworks for productive peer review, and options for virtual peer review.
Principles for Peer Review
The following principles can help you make informed decisions about how and why you are choosing to use peer review.
Feedback matters: Productive responses help writers see how their work is moving toward a clearly defined goal.
Feedback should be useful: The best responses shape future behavior by recommending productive action within an evaluative framework.
Editing is not the same thing as reviewing: There is a time for checking formatting, fixing spelling, and clarifying punctuation. But that kind of work is not the same thing as reviewing work to talk about whether a text is doing what it’s supposed to do.
Peer review needs context: Reviewers aren’t considering some abstract nature of “good work.” Rather, they are considering whether the work connects with particular criteria for success.
Reviewers need to believe in their abilities to give useful reviews. Reviewers who think that peer review is busy work aren’t going to do a good job. Reviewers who think they don’t know enough to give feedback won’t do a good job, either.
Instructors need to trust students as reviewers. We need to see the value of peer review.
Reviewing is a learnable skill. The art of giving feedback can be learned. Response is a genre, and any genre can be analyzed and described.
Reviewing must be taught. Like any genre, reviewing needs to be explicitly taught, modeled, and practiced.
Givers gain: Learning to give useful feedback helps writers; there are layers of value to peer review.
Useful feedback is specific. Generalized praise doesn’t shape behavior.
Reviewers get better with practice and feedback. Early peer reviews may not be well done. With feedback from peers and from us, students can learn to do things differently and do things better.
Students do what we value. We demonstrate what we value in many ways: how we grade it, how we look at it, how we talk about it. If we don’t value peer review, students will notice—and act accordingly.
Benefits of Peer Review
Successful peer interactions support learning when students know how to give feedback that is appropriate and useful. Peer reviewing is a teachable, learnable skill; students will learn it with guidance and practice. If you invest time in
Defining goals for peer interactions
Coaching students to effectively interact with their peers and trust their peers
Extending peer review beyond exchanges over almost-done complete drafts, to include peer interactions all along a project’s timeline
Offering feedback on students’ peer interactions
then the culture of peer interaction can flourish. Devoting time to fostering peer interactions takes pressure off other components of a course, and you can take gradual steps in any of these areas.
Peer Review Benefits for Students
Students benefit from structured peer review when they really engage in the process. You may find that some students are stronger reviewers from the start, and others will grow as reviewers thanks to the scaffolding of well-designed review tasks. Students who commit to peer review processes in terms of quantity and quality of feedback learn how to give feedback. Giving feedback-- detecting problems, explaining how the problem affects readers/text, and offering solutions-- trains even the most confident writers to revise more effectively.
For students who are learning to give quality feedback through the course, peer review provides a scaffolded and peer-norming environment in which they can catch on by participating. An effective peer review should help all writers understand how to revise and why they should want to. Those who engage highly can improve their skills. Those who go through the motions of feedback and don't challenge themselves to offer fully explained comments on substantive issues will not benefit from the activity. And reviewers with low engagement tend to cause grumpiness among more diligent students.
One approach to handling the range of review skills in a class:
At the beginning of a project, randomly mix students in peer review groups of 5. Large, diverse groups means wide exposure to strengths and weaknesses.
At the end of a project, in groups of 3-4, group writers together who are performing in similar ranges (or whose feedback performance is similar). This puts students closer to their "zone of proximal development."
So, who benefits from peer review? Reviewers who do the work.
The instructional challenge is creating a peer feedback environment where students catch skills and motivation from each other. They need practice and coaching.
Structuring Peer Review
You can coach students to be better peer reviewers by structuring your peer reviews around clear and meaningful goals. Feedback matters to both instructors and students because it helps to improve writing, but in order to be useful, it needs to be good quality feedback. Giving feedback is not something students inherently know but is instead a teachable skill.
One way to structure peer review is to make your expectations about feedback explicit. Providing students with a framework can result in peer feedback being higher quality. Quality feedback can be broken down into three main parts:
Describe
Evaluate (in relation to specific criteria)
Suggest (directed toward next steps)
Structuring the peer review conversation around these principles creates actionable feedback that students can use both in the peer review and when evaluating their own writing.
Without sufficient structuring, peer reviewing can easily turn into feedback sessions where peers offer vague encouragement and grammatical advice. While these students may be trying to be helpful, they do not tend to create actionable or structural feedback. Instead, peer review can be structured to shift students toward providing feedback on their response to the text or asking where the text can go. Feedback provided from these questions tends toward providing actionable feedback, creating more opportunities for deeper peer conversations.
Frameworks for Feedback
When building a framework for peer review, asking students to discuss limited relevant criteria can help create focused opportunities for feedback. Deciding what your students need to know to move forward in their writing can be useful when deciding how you want to structure your peer review frameworks.
There are countless ways to focus your questions on different aspects of student’s work, but to get an overview of student work, while also producing useful feedback, asking students to answer questions like:
Judging from the first three paragraphs, how complete should you guess this paper is?
On a scale of 1-5, how effectively do the paragraphs support the thesis?
How interested are you in reading this essay based on the introduction?
can help structure these conversations.
Using rating scales or checklists can also narrow student scopes, helping them to focus on a single aspect of the work rather than being overwhelmed by the entirety of the paper.
Ultimately, peer feedback requires trust and buy-in both between peers, but also by the faculty guiding these peer interactions.
Virtual Peer Review
Peer review of works-in-progress, conducted online, offers students the opportunity to see what others’ performance looks like, to develop questions about emerging assignments, and to practice discussing how any given piece of work reflects the key learning goals the instructor has identified. While peer review is often conducted in class, online spaces offer many options for writers to share ideas and plan revision.
Benefits of Online Peer Review
Flexibility: when peer review happens online, students can proceed at their own pace. In addition to being able to complete the review activities at a time of their choosing within the window an instructor specifics, students can circle back to complete a review of a slightly late peer submission.
Access: digital texts can be read with screen readers; they can be resized or otherwise modified to become more accessible.
Fixed records: when peer review occurs in online spaces, students have continued access to past reviews. There are no worries about students’ losing records of what their peers said about their work, and no worries about the reviews being unavailable when a writer is later working on revisions.
Instructor access: Peer review in online spaces is open for instructor review. When writing groups conduct their work in person, it’s hard for instructors to get a good sense of how the groups are operating. The archives of an online peer review can be viewed or visited by instructors, and that offers instructive glimpses of what students are actually doing as they discuss each others’ work. This is a valuable opportunity for instructors to see how students understand the learning criteria in action.
Options for Online Peer Review
- Google Docs, or Microsoft 365: These collaborative writing spaces are easily available and allow writers to be working in a document at the same time. Writers can share their documents with other members of the peer group (and the instructor, if desired). Commenting tools in both platforms allow comments on drafts. (Google docs is outside UVM’s secure data environment; using Word is a technically safer choice.)
- Advantages: Familiar interfaces allow students to comment at whatever length suits them. Google Docs creates histories of revisions, enabling readers to see how a document has evolved. Microsoft Word 365 is part of UVM’s supported software and thus work created there is stored within campus secured online spaces
- Disadvantages: Google docs are not spaces within the university’s secure servers and privacy settings for google must be considered by each writer. Microsoft Word 365 permits collaborative editing but doesn’t allow access to older versions as intuitively as Google docs. Collaborative writing spaces function to support composing more than reviewing; the assignment for the peer review must be provided separately. Online comments can be tricky to download or to make visible for some users. Sharing documents also privileges one-to-one exchanges rather than whole group discussion.
- Microsoft Teams: This platform offers students both an online space to meet and discuss as well as a collaborative writing space that allow writers to work on a document at the same time. Writers can upload their document to a shared folder or via a chat in a meeting.
- Advantages: This platform offers several unique functions for collaborative work. In a meeting, Teams offers screensharing, recording and transcription services, and captioning, increasing options for accessibility. In either a synchronous or asynchronous format, Teams offers a collaborative space where students can have their comments appear under a “review” setting, and thus be highlighted as not the original author for clear communication as well as add comments.
- Disadvantages: File uploading can be clunky or confusing if either not shared so that other contributors “can edit.” Interface in the browser view often disrupts formatting. If a document is downloaded instead of opened in the shared setting, contributions will not be saved to the shared file.
- Brightspace: The LMS platform includes ways to engage in peer revision processes, mainly using the Discussion Board feature. Discussion boards allow students to attach a document or copy and paste work into a discussion channel. Discussion boards also allow for instructors to monitor the discussions.
- Advantages: Discussion channels allow for multiple modes of feedback from peers including text, audio, or video responses. Instructors can monitor discussion threads and upload rubrics that students can reference as they provide feedback.
- Disadvantages: Discussion threads cannot accommodate “track changes” services offered by Google Docs or Microsoft Word.
- Perusall: This learning tool is built to allow students and instructors to collaboratively annotate documents. It has a built in peer review process and Perusall has published both student facing instructions and instructor guidance specifically for the peer review process.
- Advantages: Perusall has built in annotation and peer review features and can be directly linked with Brightspace. This tool also allows faculty to break students into smaller groups either for the entire course or by assignment. Instructors can also provide rubrics within the tool. The peer review specific assignment type breaks the assignment into stages of submission, peer review, instructor review, and author review.
- Disadvantages: Like many third party tools, there is a bit of learning curve to Perusall which can make it more difficult to begin with.
- Eli Review: Eli Review is a peer review platform designed to support writing classrooms in which peer feedback is a core practice. A subscription service (students pay a modest amount or institutional subscriptions can be purchased in bulk), Eli Review’s format makes it easy for instructors to create writing groups and guide peer review. In addition, Eli Review’s tools focus on coaching students to give and get better feedback, while the instructor dashboard aggregates data about each peer review cycle, making it possible for instructors to easily see trends in the class as well as to dive into what students are saying to each other.
- Advantages: This stable platform, designed by writing teachers, is built for writing instruction. The interface focuses students’ attention on the review tasks assigned by the instructor. Eli Review’s data dashboards offer a rich view of how students are learning together.
- Disadvantages: Eli Review has a subscription fee, and with any system there is a learning curve.