There’s advice and there are activities that can help develop students’ abilities to offer constructive feedback and use the feedback they receive from peers to more accurately self-assess and improve their work. Those aren’t skills that college students today widely possess, but they’re skills that can be taught and ones that will serve students well in the years ahead. The advice and activities recommended below can be adjusted to accommodate peer review of written work, projects, and performances. If students aren’t strong in these skills areas, it’s best to develop them incrementally.
Offer peer review skill instruction. In an interesting study, Min (2006) worked on skill development in class and provided feedback on each student’s first set of peer-review comments. After that training, peer-triggered revisions accounted for 90 percent of the changes students made, which was significantly higher than the changes triggered by peers before the training.
- Give students exemplars and let them make judgements about them. The very fine article highlighted in last week’s column offers excellent advice on facilitating discussions of exemplars. Bottom line: teachers should avoid pointing out all the fine features of exemplars. That’s precisely what students need to be able to do, and practice is the best way to develop that skill.
Provide peer-review opportunities. The best place to begin may be by finding out how much experience students have doing peer review, how comfortable they are with the process, and whether they understand its value. Without that knowledge, it’s hard to design activities that begin building skills that students need. It’s also good to begin with realistic expectations. If students haven’t done much peer review, there are lots of reasons to expect their first attempts to be less than splendid.
- Start with formative assessments that don’t have peers grading or rating the work they’re reviewing.
- Let students make anonymous assessments, especially if they aren’t used to reviewing their classmates’ work.
- Provide the review criteria and instruct students to offer feedback only in those areas. That helps prevent comments on irrelevant aspects of the assignment. In a classic article, Nilson (2003) offers a set of items pertaining to written work that “ask students simply to identify (paraphrase, list, outline, star, underline, highlight, bracket, check) parts or features of the work . . . as each student sees them” (p. 36). It’s a great set of prompts for students new to peer review in that it gives them specific tasks (such as underlining the thesis sentence in every paragraph) and de-emphasizes the judgmental aspects of the feedback process.
- Give students a set of feedback comments and have them identify those that are helpful, or solicit constructive feedback examples from students.
- Having students exchange feedback online adds speed and efficiency to the process. Cathey (2007) describes a semester-long online peer-review activity in which students wrote short essays that applied course content and two anonymous peer reviewers read and commented on each essay using the instructor-supplied criteria.
- When two peers review the same piece of work, that gives each of them the opportunity to compare their assessment with that made by another. Jhangiani (2016) studied the effects of a peer-review activity that involved two students grading a third student’s quiz answers. It’s a unique activity in that under certain conditions the peer grade counts.
Recognize and take advantage of how giving feedback develops self-assessment skills. Research strongly suggests that giving feedback increases students’ abilities to more accurately judge their own work. Some of the best work on this outcome has been done by Royce Sadler. I’ve highlighted it here, here, and here. As students use criteria to review a peer’s work, in the back of their minds they’re applying the same criteria to their own work. Sadler actually proposes that this reflective analysis is more significant than the feedback peers provide and receive. White and Kirby (2005) report that’s what their students said about a peer-review activity in an upper-division undergraduate course.
- Offer opportunities for students to reflect on what they learned about their work as they reviewed the work of a peer. They could do so in a short reaction paper, or they could list revisions they intend to make and note how they selected these. If students are providing written feedback to each other in memo format, have them submit each memo with an addendum that discusses what, if any, of the feedback they’ve given the peer applies to their work.
Encourage self-assessment. It’s tough for students to share thoughts about their work with a teacher. From the student’s perspective, telling the teacher that the work is good and then finding that the teacher didn’t think so is embarrassing. At the same time, if the student confesses that parts of the assignment need more work, maybe that will bias the teacher’s assessment.
- Talk with students about the importance of self-assessment skills and challenge them to do an assessment before they submit an assignment. They should identify the assignment’s strongest parts and anticipate what the teacher will recommend they improve. They should make a guess at their grade—which will be easier if you have shared the grading criteria with them. If the graded assignment is compared with the self-assessment, they have an example of self-assessment accuracy.
- Before a peer review, let students identify a specified number of questions they’d like the reviewer’s comments to address. In addition to encouraging an in-depth look at their work, this strategy gives students some control over where the feedback is focused.
References
Cathey, C. (2007). Power of peer review: An online collaborative learning assignment in social psychology. Teaching of Psychology, 34(2), 97–99. https://doi.org/10.1080/00986280701291325
Jhangiani, R. S. (2016). The impact of participating in a peer assessment activity on subsequent academic performance. Teaching of Psychology, 43(3), 180–186. https://doi.org/10.1177/0098628316649312
Min, H.-T. (2006). The effects of trained peer review on EFL students’ revision types and writing quality. Journal of Second Language Writing, 15(2), 118–141. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2006.01.003
Nilson, L. B. (2003). Improving student peer feedback. College Teaching, 51(1), 34–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/87567550309596408
White, T. L., & Kirby, B. J. (2005). ’Tis better to give than receive: An undergraduate peer review project. Teaching of Psychology, 32(4), 259–261.
