Peer Review Skills and Activities

Prerequisite Skills

• Before asking students to engage in online peer review, establish document naming conventions.

• Teach students to use the commenting features of their word processing software.

In-Class Practices

• Students can work together in person on a document on screen and revise collaboratively.

• Simply switching seats in a computer classroom allows peers to work directly with each other's drafts.

• See Peer Review Skills: Sharing Files.

• See Nick Carbone's A Peer Review Activity Suggestion.

Email Activites

Establish standardized subject lines for email. Students should also learn to save files in rich text format for greatest interoperability between disparate word processing programs.

• Exchange documents in class for a close reading, then have readers email comments to writers.

• Continue the comments/discussion begun in class.

• Post paragraphs or sections to a group list for multiple responses.

• Coordinate collaborative projects.

• Send essays as attachments before class to better prepare for a review session.

Document Management Systems

• A program such as Comment helps make peer review visible to the teacher.

• WebCT, Blackboard, and similar software products allow for exchanges between members of your class:
  • Individual document exchange
  • Peer review groups
  • Full class reviews

Discussion Boards

• In course management systems, the discussion board audience can be restricted to the class.

• Web-based discussion boards can be public, or restricted via password protection.

• Discussion boards privilege a different kind of peer critique, focusing on larger issues such as organization and the validity of the ideas expressed; they can help students avoid focusing on surface errors as the main component of peer review.

On the Web (Public)

• Instructors can post sample papers and comments.

• Instructors can provide rubrics and other criteria.

• Classes can evaluate professional writing.

• Students can post their own work (or even a portfolio of work), as well as read others' writing.

• Students can incorporate links to relevant resources in their comments on their classmates' writing.

• Instructor comments can also be made public, providing a model of the kinds of critique students should be producing.

• There are several open-source programs for peer review, such as the SITES Instructional Tool Distributions created by Daniel Anderson at UNC-Chapel Hill.

• Peer review systems such as Comment and the SITES peer review tool mentioned above provide rubrics and mechanisms for guiding students through the peer-review process.