Writing is an intriguing process, whether it is a small child learning to trace out the letters of his name or an accomplished author seeking to put the story that has taken shape in her mind down onto paper in words that others will understand and find compelling. The process of turning thoughts into words and then recording those words onto paper has long been one that has been a source of fascination, whether it was the creation of the dramas of the ancient Greeks or such world-changing essays as Jonathan Swift’s paradigm shift on the treatise in “A Modest Proposal.” 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 instructors use for a number of different purposes. First, and perhaps most practically, it takes a lot of the grading 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. 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, if those multiple perspectives are not taken from a point of competence, then they are actually less useful than the student simply revising and editing his own paper himself would have been. 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, leaving the student with a false air of confidence about his writing process. Of course, the opposite problem can also happen, as peer assessors strike their red pens through every last Oxford 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.
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. If they were ready to possess it, they would not only not need to take the class, they would be qualified to teach the class themselves (Kaufman & Schunn, p. 403). 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. So remember that practical advantage of a reduced grading load? I would rephrase this to suggest that the professor has more assessing but less grading 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. Many times, students (myself included) will ball up papers with grades that we do not like or think we deserved and throw them away without reading the comments that the teachers wrote in the margins for us to see. The point is that students do not read much (if any) of the written feedback that they receive on essays when they come back. Instead, they look at the grade and move on.
I would suggest that a better way to grade writing is through progress over time in the course rather than on individual assignments. 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. “Students’ Perceptions about Peer Assessment for Writing: Their Origin
and Impact on Revision Work.” Instructional Science 39: 387-406.
