Student-to-Student Collaboration

Peer review can seem like a great waste of class time.  Often, students see in-class peer review days as a chance to discuss last night’s terrific party, or who broke up with whom, or who did poorly on the chemistry test, or even as a lovely and convenient opportunity to take a surreptitious nap.  But the most significant impact of a wasted in-class peer review session is when students give each other ill-conceived and/or confusing advice--all within a fifty minute class period.  Why, then, even bother having students peer review each other's papers? Because at its best, peer review can allow students to find out that they are not alone with their writing difficulties and anxieties, and they start to build a vocabulary for discussing writing with a “real” audience.  Peer review groups can also motivate each other to revise and be more aware of their use of language, and these groups can increase the sense of community in the classroom and promote active learning. 
Taking the basic principles of what a good peer review session should be, our small group of faculty collaborated to devise a system that extends the traditional in-class peer review structure: our students write letters to writers in other classes.
Rationale

• Collaboration.  What prompted us to think about student-to-student collaboration in the first place is the importance of collaboration in our own lives as a teachers and writers.  We want students to experience collaborating on a real document that provides real advice to real students.  Our students work in pairs to produce letters to student writers in another class. 
  
  We have formulated some guidelines for our form of peer review.  Our guidelines help students who seem to have trouble coming up with something to say, which may be a sign that they're not reading as reviewers yet, just as peers.  The questions we ask on the guidelines are also open-ended and ask the audience to describe as well as to suggest.  Furthermore, peer review letter writing slows the students down.  Not only are pairs of students discussing openly another student’s writing, they are also constructing their own piece of writing, which allows for more thoughtful and considerate responses.

We wanted to be sure that we worked in as part of our process having the writers "talk" to the peer reviewers, mainly because this is part of the reflective thinking they need to be doing.  In Radical Equations,Robert P. Moses suggests that we learn by doing something, reflecting on what went wrong and what went right, coming up with adjustments, and trying it again.  We ask that writers ask peer reviewers to look at and comment on specific things, which forces the peer reviewers to reflect more deeply on what they’re reading rather than make the casual, flippant, and general comments they often do.

• Flattery.  We all like to get personal letters.  At a very basic level receiving a lengthy response to something that you've written is flattering--it’s nice to indulge in a bit of ego stroking now and again.  Indeed, we make sure our peer reviewers start on a positive note even if they recognize that the writing isn’t particularly strong.  If student writers have a positive feeling about their writing, we think they are more likely to play with and revise that writing.  And as an inadvertent but important consequence of writing on a positive note, peer reviewers learn to write persuasively in a real world situation.  They are genuinely trying to persuade a reader to change something. 

 

• Objectivity.  Why have students from different professors' classes peer review each
  other's papers?  In short, objectivity.   Psychologically, we believe most people are more likely to be "critical" with people they don't know. But objective, anonymous peer reviewing also builds a shared sense of what writing is between students; more so than within a classroom setting.  Students are more likely to be less serious about peer review if they are familiar with each other—this is where the discussion of last night’s party rears its head.
  
• Thinking Critically.  As teachers we often rely on text book readings to help students
  understand concepts.  However, “perfect” essays by professional writers are not necessarily essays students relate to; in fact, students are often fearful of this near perfect writing.  And that’s the problem: text book texts are almost faultless in terms of writing.  Generally, text book texts don’t ask students to examine the writers’ writing.  Students who examine their peers’ essays, however, that are a mixture of different ideas and different levels of writing ability can reinforce students’ understanding of their own texts—not only the ideas students present but also the level of writing ability.  Furthermore, examining the texts of their peers really help students better understand audience and purpose—no assignment can force that issue.  

 
Method

Currently, we have three faculty in our group who have classes swap papers.  Through a trial-and-error procedure, we have discovered some essentials to success:

• We have to allow sufficient time to complete peer reviews.  We allocate a week in which to complete the process.  We collect our students’ papers, we meet to swap our papers, we redistribute the collected papers to our students (students spend a class period making notes about a writer’s paper), we collect peer review letters, and, finally, we distribute the peer review letters to our students.
• We do not allow students to take papers out of the classroom in case they fail to return them, which might lead plagiarism.
• The time of a class is not really an issue, but the number of students in class is.  We swap with whichever instructor has the closest number of students to our own. 
• We have learned that students are often unreliable in writing peer review letters, so we track students’ “reliability.”    
• Peer reviews must be at least a single-spaced page long letter—fluff is not acceptable. (We use guidelines for every peer review).
• We make an allowance for an instructor and student writer to grade the peer review letter.
• We do not allow late peer reviews because writers are restricted in revision time.
• Peer reviews cannot be revised because papers are turned in for a grade immediately after conducting peer review.

 

Peer Review Prompts

What is this essay about?

Audience
Who do you think is the audience for this paper?

Purpose
What do you think is the writer’s purpose? 

Introduction
Look at the title, the introduction and the thesis statement (the paper’s central idea or main point).  Does the title and “hook” really work to engage your attention?  Paraphrase the thesis statement.  What changes to the introduction would you suggest?

Body
Do the writer’s ideas flow well—unified, coherent, well-developed—from beginning to end?  How so?  How not? Does the topic sentence keep the paragraph unified? Or do other, unrelated ideas creep into the paragraph? Are sentences too long, too choppy?  Does the writer use transitions?   Does the writer vary punctuation?  What could the writer do to improve structure or development? 

Voice
Can you feel the presence of the writer?  Is the writer’s persona trustworthy, credible, well-informed, thoughtful, and fair?  Does the writer’s voice strive to be plain and clear while retaining the engaging quality of a person who is enthusiastic about the subject?   How so?  How not?

Research
If there is research, examine the writer’s use of it to support his or her ideas.  Evaluate the writer’s reliance on sources, integration of quotations, and other evidence.  Is there adequate support for the writer’s ideas and claims? Or has the writer relied too much on expert opinion (or his or her own personal experience, which makes the piece too personal and hard to relate to)—is the paper a “patchwork” of other people’s views. What can be added or changed in terms of research?   What needs work?

Grammar, punctuation, mechanics
Do you find yourself distracted by grammatical, punctuation, or mechanical errors? If there is a consistent error (for instance, problems with comma splices), point it out.

Conclusion
How might the conclusion more effectively bring completeness or closure to the paper?  Or does the paper just stop?  Or does the writer try to bring in new ideas?  Does the writer have a strong end line?

Assessment
Finally, what did you learn from this essay that you did not know before?  Ask questions if needed. Comment on either the ideas or on the writing strategies used by the writer.