The Interest and Sources and Methods

In my undergraduate at Western my largest frustration came from peer feedback days. I knew I was a good enough writer that most of my class would enjoy what I wrote, and so when it came time for my piece to be critiqued a got a chorus of “it was good,” followed by two to four notes of things I could actually change. Even the professors seemed to fall into this trap of just being able to provide positive feedback after a few good reviews were tossed at a story. It felt like there was some real fear that a constructive critique would be misconstrued as cruel criticism. My goal is to see how specifically taking time to build peer review skills will affect the results of final projects in English 101.

I began my research by examing four studies in peer review, with my prediction being that better peer reviews will result in better projects; I will take the time to summarize Patricia Dunn, Richard Chisholm, and a general WAC article in greater detail. Patricia Dunn describes in Strategies for Using, Sketching, Speaking, Movement, and Metaphor to Generate and Organize Text the primary concern with peer review is that there will always be students who don’t care. With a required class like English 101, this does feel inevitable, but I believe with a workshop-like atmosphere surrounding the understanding of peer review to both provide the tools students need for giving feedback, and progressively building on skills the students have already acquired, the classroom can maximize engagement. One suggestion from Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) is to build in incentives for better comments. This could mean grading the peer review, having students rank the peer review they receive, or having a separate point on the rubric for peer review as a form of class participation. This is an important lesson, not only for our English 101 students, but for us as instructors, as WAC points out,

Graduate students, like undergraduates, need clear criteria to guide their reading and response to peers’ drafts…graduate students also need help recognizing their strengths as responders so that they can overcome their reluctance to critique peers and improve their critical thinking, reading, and writing.

Dunn then goes into a list of helpful tips: Make observations first, if there are several short sentences or repeated words, state that without suggesting a change; be specific, if something is awkward, say when you became lost; and give listeners questions to help guide their reading. Strategies provides several anecdotes and building skills to develop peer review abilities, some of which I find useful and some of which are strange to me. The one I saw as the oddest was the idea of cutting and pasting work to show how moveable it can be; this is a technique that has never been effective for me, but I imagine visual students in a class could benefit from it, and I could definitely see it being useful for something like the poster project. Another strategy I find helpful is what I think of as the questions game where students are only allowed to ask open ended questions about the work, usually starting with one student as a model (Dunn 96). These questions can be asked as the student reads their work aloud, or after reading silently; both would be worth trying in a thoughtful manner.

A tricky concept brought up by Dunn is the idea of social intelligence, which sounds similar to the emotional intelligence Mikel talked about in their discussion on research. The struggle is in teaching students how to be good responders who have “both insight and tact, a delicate balance of straightforwardness and compassion, praise and productive critique,” (Dunn 94). I believe I can work with other instructors and their students to build that level or respect in a classroom, but, to me, that is the biggest hurdle. For me, taking the Academic Review Guidelines (see appendix) I adapted and adding to them for each class would be a part of creating the space where the students can receive critique.

In the interest of involving the students, it would be helpful to take another leaf from a WAC article penned by Richard Chisholm who asks “students to write down their concerns about collaborative review. This freewrite often brings to the surface students’ anxieties about group work and points to the problems we will need to cope with throughout the semester.” Chisholm breaks down feedback into four different categories:

1. Identify Values in the Paper
   1. What were the best parts? What resonated? What surprised you? What ideas excited you? We are sharing values, not stoking ego.
2. Describe the Paper
   1. What is the main idea? Where do you expect the paper to go after the fist page? This is the observation phase.
3. Ask questions about the paper
   1. Be explicit about where you see problems. Ask for clarification, more information, and explanation of points you found interesting.
4. Suggestions to Revise
   1. Point out places that need more information, clarity, or rethinking. Tell what you wish the paper had said or might have said.

In talking with Zack about how this project could move forward, he expressed interest in building on peer review so there was always something new for the students to look for. With the frequent change in genre and medium, these changes in peer review are implicit, but calling explicit attention to them will hopefully help the students feel more involved in the formation of the peer review process. For me, I can see each of these being used as lightning rods for reviewing a particular project as a way of teaching what peer review can be beyond editing for conventions.

I would like to acknowledge that I expect parts of this to fail, in part because of how resistant students are to peer review, but also because some parts will simply not be effective. In The Art of Effective Facilitations, Brian Arao and Kristi Clemens both conduct an exercise called 1 step forward 1 step back that did not go over well. When they received pushback, there was an initial desire to simply say the students were uncomfortable discussing power and privilege, but that would not engage the pedagogy, and it oversimplified the feedback the students gave them. Likewise, I would like this work to be open to student feedback and change.

To carry out this study I would work with willing classes to increase the amount of peer review in them, and check in with other classes that are not intentionally doing extra peer review work to compare the reported impact peer review has on their students. Surveys would be conducted to gain insight into the students perception of peer review and whether or not it was helpful to their projects. Interviews with instructors and students would also be conducted for more specific information about what worked and what didn’t work. It would also be interesting to compare overall grades between classes with peer review emphasis versus classes without peer review emphasis.

Appendix and Calendar

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SlUaT2mk2gBg3bXst7Ip3e1JEp8CQX26Bciya34jQZo/edit?usp=sharing

Works Cited

 Arao, Brian, and Clemens, Kristi. From Safe Spaces to Brave Spaces. 2013, p. 16.

Chisholm, Richard M. Introduction Students to Peer Review or Writing. 2006, p16

Dunn, Patricia. Strategies for Using, Sketching, Speaking, Movement, and Metaphor to Generate and Organize Text. P. 21 Strategies to Generate and Organize Text

How Can I Get the Most Out of Peer Review? – The WAC Clearinghouse. https://wac.colostate.edu/resources/wac/intro/peer/. Accessed 1 Dec. 2018.