Using peer response effectively

Many of us have witnessed this before: We ask students to comment on each others' papers, and their responses all fit within the category of surface critiques, with statements like "good job", "add page numbers to your draft", or "your margins are too wide." We may think that peer response, or peer review, activities are a less than effective use of class time, and our students, accustomed as they are to receiving those "surface comments" will probably agree with us. Maybe it's time, though, to give peer response another chance.

Faculty at a recent workshop (co-sponsored by the CFD and the Writing Center) identified a number of positive outcomes from peer response activities:

1. Students learn from reading each others' work.
   
2. Students may take greater care with their writing if they know that their peers are going to read their drafts.
   
3. Students' writing will improve, though perhaps incrementally.
   
4. Students' critical reading abilities improve.
   
5. Students learn editing and proofreading skills.
   
6. Students learn to value the process of writing and editing drafts.
   
7. Students learn from their peers.
   

To ensure these outcomes, though, instructors need to be mindful of a number of considerations:

1. Before asking students to respond to their peers' papers, take the time in class to model the content, tone, and quality of responses that you want the students to offer one another. You don't have to think of this as lost class time; if students are actively engaged in modeling effective peer responses, they're learning.
   
2. Don't judge the success of peer response by the quality of draft revisions. We may not see improvements immediately from one draft to another, but that does not mean that students are not learning from one another.
   
3. Don't expect students to offer the same kind of responses that you, the instructor, would offer. In fact, you can go so far as to encourage responses that students might be most comfortable offering.
   

Most important, perhaps, is to be mindful of the goals you want to achieve when using peer response activities—improved drafts of student papers should probably not be your only goal—and to understand that effective peer response requires plenty of planning, even before the semester begins.

Metro State faculty can get help developing peer response activities from either the Writing Center or the CFD.