Can you remember the last project you wrote for a single reader? How about the last one you finished in one draft and with zero input from peers?
In papers written for one reader (the instructor) without peer feedback (classmates), learners face an artificial situation. They write to perform—not to communicate, the purpose of most writing done beyond the classroom’s walls.
We have various options for making writing assignments more authentic. In my own teaching, I’ve experimented with community-engaged writing projects, in which the collaborating organization selected a few students’ pieces for publication; ePortfolios, which will ideally reach an online audience; and group writing assignments (check out the upcoming workshop Assigning Group Writing Projects to Teach Teamwork & Collaboration).
Those methods sound great in theory, you might be thinking, but don’t they require a lot of coordination by the instructor? That’s true—but I have good news. There’s a relatively simple option for making your writing assignments more authentic: facilitating peer review. In peer review, students provide feedback on each other’s drafts with an eye toward revising. This method restores the communicative purpose to writing in a couple ways:
- Peer review inherently grants students an audience beyond their instructor, giving them a realistic experience of writing for a heterogenous readership. (Ferris & Hedgcock, 2023)
- Students will get practice with critiquing colleagues’ work diplomatically and receiving feedback graciously. Whatever the future holds for students, I guarantee that these skills will serve them well.
Additionally, by analyzing classmates’ writing, students will become more attentive to their own writing. In fact, the giver of feedback often benefits as much as the recipient—i.e., giver’s gain (Eli Review, 2022). Research (and my own teaching experience) shows that with training, undergrads can give feedback that’s just as good as what the professor would give (Bean & Melzer, 2021).
The training is crucial. Before I developed robust training, a particularly forthright student lamented that peer review felt like the ignorant guiding the ignorant. Students, afraid to offend each other, were offering simplistic comments along the lines of “Looks great, just make sure to fix your commas.
I realized that I needed to figure out what kinds of feedback I wanted students to give each other—and model the process with them before they embarked on the first peer review. If you’re ready to develop or revamp peer review training and structure, I’d love to talk with you.
For more about the “how” of facilitating effective peer review, check out Giving Feedback with Peer Review and Rubrics: Why and How? on March 11 at 11:00 a.m., which you can join in person or on Zoom. Relatedly, my colleagues have written helpful tips on teaching writing as a process and using the Canvas peer review tool.
One last thought: Students’ misuse of generative AI for writing assignments reveals their alienation from schoolwork. To restore the primacy of human writers and readers—exchanging ideas, interacting, communicating—we need to ask students to read their classmates’ writing and have conversations about it.
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