Learning to write more effectively is one task that many university students struggle to complete, for a number of reasons. Many of them move through middle and high school learning to write to a particular formula that will help them to pass a standardized assessment that is often necessary for graduation but has almost no resemblance to the sort of writing that they will be expected to do down the road in the professional world. Once those students come to college and find that there are many more ways to write than that cookie cutter formula that they learned before graduation, moving forward in writing can be liberating for some and frustrating for others, as some revel in the lack of formula while others find themselves almost helpless without it. At this point, the instruction process should be less about moving through essays with a red pen and more about finding what is strong in a student’s writing and giving the student insights about ways to bring the rest of the writing to that same strength point – and moving even further forward as a writer. Peer review is a tool that many professors use in the classroom for a variety of reasons. When it is used as part of a multifaceted program of writing instruction, then it can be quite effective. If professors are not clear about their expectations, or if they do not accompany peer review with a detailed explanation of the rubric (or of ways to meet the terms of that rubric), then the process can be quite frustrating for the writer, the writer’s peers and the instructor.
Peer review allows the instructor to move into more of a facilitating role, leading to less of an instructor-centered classroom. First, and perhaps most practically, it takes a lot of the review load off the instructor. By passing out rubrics and anointing other students as able to assess the writing of their peers, instructors ensure that the rough drafts of student writing will not be in their own inboxes but instead will work their way through a murky nexus of peer interactions. Students emerge from this network of conversations with their peers with a different sense of what the focus of the paper should have been and how well their paper does (or does not) take issue with that focus. They also get feedback from multiple perspectives about the various stylistic elements in their own writing, complete with ideas about how to improve those elements as they move from the rough draft and toward the publication process. Throughout the entire sequence, the instructor becomes more of a facilitator than an evaluator, distributing the tools and allowing the students to use them. This turns the instructor from judge to facilitator.
Is this a positive change? Well, it does mean that students hear multiple perspectives about their writing from their peers instead of just the one perspective of their instructor. If the peer review process is explained clearly and carefully, and if the students in the room buy into the possibility that comes with peer review, then it can be a useful strategy. However, students believe that these multiple perspectives are not taken from a point of competence, then they can find them less useful than the student simply revising and editing his own paper himself would have been. Until students understand “the ways in which writing can be useful in many areas of one’s life,” (Brammer & Rees, p. 72), they will not take part in peer review as seriously as they ought. This can lead to frustration for those in the peer group who do take the task seriously and pursue it diligently. This can end up undermining the entire exercise. When the feedback comes without a careful perusal of the rubric, or is done hastily, then it likely misses the crucial errors that the student made in his writing. Of course, the opposite problem can also happen, as peer assessors strike their red pens through every last comma, and they criticize every word choice that they themselves would not have made. The end result is a paper that looks like someone has bled all over it, but the objections that the reviewer made are mostly aesthetic in nature, rather than structural. This not only tears down the writer’s confidence (because of the sheer volume of red ink festooning the page) but also fails to teach the writer the lesson that the instructor had intended. This happened to me in a high school Advanced Placement English course. The teacher distributed rubrics for our essays, and then she assigned us to groups of four. Two of us were interested in working hard and improving our writing, while the other two had already slipped into “senior-itis” and weren’t taking much seriously at that point. The other serious person in the group hammered my practice essay, circling every misspelling and every missing punctuation item, but she didn’t have much to criticize about the points I made in the paper, and about my use of evidence. The other two in the group basically marked nothing and gave me “7” scores, which made me pleased (it’s a 9-point scale). However, the other serious person gave me a “4” but couldn’t explain it on the basis of the rubric. This really confused me, because when I looked at it I saw basically a “6” based on the rubric, but I had three scores – and once I realized that the two “7”s came from people who hadn’t done much serious reading of my paper, I was worried. I had to go in and visit with the teacher after school to get an accurate appraisal, and she agreed with me on the “6”. The reason why spelling and punctuation are not major factors on the AP test is that the essays are done in 40 minutes, and the readers know to expect first-draft quality (some errors in grammar and spelling) because you just do not have time to edit for those things in any depth. For me, though, this whole peer review exercise was a waste of time.
What works best is when the instructor utilizes peer review as part of a multi-faceted strategy for improving student writing. When the instructor only facilitates, that gives students too much authority in the process, an authority that they are not yet ready to possess by themselves. As Kaufman & Schunn note, “students’ negative perceptions of SWoRD were strongest in those courses where grades for writing were provided only by peers and not by the instructor” (p. 403). The implication is that students realize that there is a gap between what they know and what the instructor has for them to learn. Indeed, if they were ready to run the review process all by themselves, they would not only not need to take the class, they would be qualified to teach it themselves. While there is some use to having students master the rubric and then use that mastery not only in improving their writing themselves but also reinforcing their own mastery by helping others improve as well, without the leadership of the instructor, that process can get out of control relatively quickly. Indeed, peer review has been described as “one of the most diffuse, inconsistent, and ambiguous practices associated with writing instruction” (Armstrong & Paulson, p. 398). For the process to be effective, this means that the instructor must be an integral part of the assessment process, not just a facilitator.
What does this mean in practical terms? The instructor must be part of the assessment teams; he must be one of the ones actively assessing papers. Student perceptions of the effectiveness of peer review elevate when the instructor is involved (Kaufman & Schunn, p. 403). So remember that practical advantage of a reduced review load? I would rephrase this to suggest that the professor has more assessing but less formal response to do, so while the actual workload might involve fewer written comments on papers, those instead take the form of verbal comments in assessment groups. That way the student has both the assessor and the feedback present at the same time.
Peer review should also take place multiple times over a course, instead of just one time, so students can get a clear sense of their progress. Admittedly, peer review is “well established as an important theoretical component of the writing process” (Brammer & Rees, p. 71). With that said, there are students who enter a writing classroom already knowing how to do everything that the teacher will want from them over the course of the class. However, that is a slender minority. The vast majority come into classrooms in need of the writing improvements that the instructor has in store for them. The problem is that students do not always know what improvements they need, and so there is a frustration for both teacher and student in the communication process of the needed steps. A collaborative model of instructor, peer and student working together towards writing improvement not only teaches the students but it also enriches the practice of the instructor. Over time, the processes of all parties will improve, keeping the writing instruction from getting stale and helping each student move toward his full potential.
Works Cited
Armstrong, Sonya & Paulson, Eric. “Whither ‘Peer Review’? Terminology Matters for the
Writing Classroom.” Teaching English in the Two Year College 35(4): 398-407.
Brammer, Charlotte & Rees, Mary. “Peer Review from the Students’ Perspective:
Invaluable or Invalid?” Composition Studies 35(2): 71-87.
Kaufman, Julia & Schunn, Christian. “Students’ Perceptions about Peer Assessment for
Writing: Their Origin and Impact on Revision Work.” Instructional Science 39: 387-406.
