Scene Six: My Students Don't Take Peer Review Seriously!

Overview

Writing instruction is a central component of undergraduate education that is no longer restricted to the English department. Through initiatives such as writing across the curriculum, individual departments are taking up the burden of writing instruction in order to teach their graduates the communication skills particular to their fields. Consequently, many professors who have little or no background in writing instruction are called on to teach writing intensive courses. These courses require the active participation of students and make heavy use of various kinds of active learning strategies, particularly small group peer review activities.

As any practitioner of the craft can attest, writing is an iterative activity. A finished piece evolves from notes and preliminary drafts, through revisions suggested by peers, to finished manuscript. This process is obvious to professors and others who publish professional work, but in most cases it is absolutely foreign to undergraduates. They see writing as a one-time activity in which the writer sits down, composes the requisite piece in the space of a few hours, and is done with it. Convincing students of the important of peer review, then, can be a challenge.

But it is extremely important. By incorporating meaningful and productive peer review sessions into your writing intensive course, you can model for students the importance of revision and the iterative approach to writing. To achieve this requires careful planning and intervention on the part of the instructor. She must confront lack of student buy in to the process of peer review and break down false assumptions. She must counter student complaints that peer review is a waste of time because the instructor will eventually read the paper and convince them of the importance of peer commentary. To be successful, instructors must model a peer review process for students to follow so that the comments they provide are substantive and relevant, not shallow and congratulatory which is too often the case.

The following scene explores some of the problems that instructors may face with small group peer review of written work. It offers recommendations to instructors, particularly those new to writing instruction, for addressing them.

Scene

Bill is a professor in the sociology department. He is teaching a writing intensive seminar and has decided to include an in-class session for students to review one another's preliminary drafts. He has broken students into groups of three or four and instructed each of them to bring enough copies of their drafts to distribute to their peers. He requested that students read the drafts prior to class, making notes and revision comments based on a rubric he distributed to them.

Bill begins the session by explaining the goal of the activity and the procedure students should follow during it. He had set aside ten minutes for the review of each paper, believing that students would need every minute of it to adequately discuss each work. As the class begins, Bill circulates through the room, watching students and listening to their comments. In general, the quality of the comments he hears are low. Students say things such as "good job," "I liked it," or "it seemed to flow well." As he thought about how best to address the superficiality of these kinds of comments, he noticed that one group of three students had finished reviewing their first paper after only a minute or so. Clearly, these students don't understand how to conduct a peer review and don't value the opportunity for it.

Video

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Implications of the Scene

The scene above illustrates two of the most common problems with peer review of writing: students fail to understand the process of peer review and they lack buy in to the concept.

The first issue is easier to address than the second. Clearly, students need some training in how to conduct a peer review before they're asked to do one. Bill provided a rubric–a checklist of elements regarding writing style, argument, organization, etc.–and told his students to use it as a basis for making comments on others' papers. He didn't, however, provide specific guidance for carrying out the review. It was clear in the video that his students needed such guidance. Their peer review broke down quickly, and in the first episode Bill was uncertain how to handle the situation. In the second, he quickly stepped in to provide guidance to his students, leading them through the peer review process as a way of modeling it.

It is very important to intervene as quickly as possible when peer review teams experience problems. Working with teams one-on-one is effective but time consuming and inefficient. You might consider creating an assignment in which you introduce the importance of peer review to your students and teach them the fundamentals of conducting such a review.

One such assignment is to hold a "mock review" in which the entire class focuses on a single paper. The instructor should distribute a paper and ask students to read it before the following session. The paper should illustrate the kinds of concerns the instructor hopes his students will identify in their own writing; it can be instructor-written or written by a student from a past semester (anonymous, of course). The instructor should also hand out a scoring rubric or a revision checklist for students to refer to when reading the paper. Students should identify two or three concerns in the draft based on elements in the rubric, noting why they are problems and how they may be corrected. Tell students to write directly on the draft since it will be handed back to the writer to aid revision.

The in-class mock review may be held as follows. Sitting in a circle, the instructor plays the role of writer, modeling the kinds of questions that a writer may ask when others are reading his paper ("why do you think that?" "Does this part make sense to you?" "How would you fix that?" etc.). Spend some time addressing various issues (argument, structure, style, tone, and audience) while moving from student to student to model the "round robin" format of a typical peer review session. When students offer comments that are shallow, treat them as teachable moments just as you should when students offer perceptive, concrete recommendations for revision.

The mock review is your opportunity to model both the process of peer review and the kind of feedback that students should give one another. Students are reluctant to give negative commentary to their peers, so you should spend some time talking about what constitutes constructive feedback and how it can be tactfully delivered. It is also important to make clear to students that the words on the page are separate from the writer who created them; saying that a paragraph, sentence, or idea needs work isn't saying that the writer is somehow deficient. This isn't an easy concept to impress on students.

One thing that may help is to bring in some of your own writing, preliminary drafts especially, and show them to students. If you've saved versions of college papers, so much the better. When students see that the instructor also makes false starts, writes run on sentences, and struggles with expressing ideas, they begin to realize that writing is a craft that takes practice, hard work, and many drafts. They understand that no piece of writing is perfect on the first try, a nice way to impress on them the importance of revision and peer review.

The last point gets at the issue of student buy in to the process of revision–to the multi-draft process of composition itself. When students don't buy into the process of writing in stages, peer review becomes a meaningless exercise to be got through as painlessly as possible. Participation is grudging, leading to superficial comments and little time spent on the exercise. Convincing students of the importance of revising their writing is not easy. As suggested above, you may show your own writing and how it progresses through drafts or you may have students read about the composition process of others.

In some cases, though, students will simply not be persuaded to revise their work. The best guarantee for their participation is to grade it. Collect students' revision comments in portfolios and assign a grade to them. Make the grade substantial enough to encourage that they take this work seriously. Some instructors assign 25 or 50 percent of the final activity grade to revision work. Rather than a portfolio, you may assign students a brief "revision" essay in which they reflect on the quality of the comments they offered to peers and how they used their peers' comments to revise their own writing. This essay can then be graded as a record of their participation and counted as part of the final grade for the exercise.

There are many strategies that instructors can use to help students internalize the process of writing. They all take commitment on the part of the instructor and a willingness to shoulder a higher workload.

Recommendations

• Recognize that peer reviews often falter because students fail to understand the process of peer review or they lack buy in to the concept. Develop strategies to address these concerns in your students.
• Teach students how to conduct a peer review. Focus on the reasons for doing them, the process to follow, and how to give (and receive) constructive feedback.
• Create a rubric or checklist for students to use during peer review.
• Grade students' revision and peer review work. Consider portfolio grading or having students submit a revision essay outlining the comments they offered their peers and how they used peer comments to improve their own writing.
• Intervene as quickly as possible when groups struggle with peer review.
• Make it clear to your students that they should not expect to rely solely on the instructor's comments for their reviews. Peer commentary is important.