What do students get out of peer review?

Walls, Laura & Kelley, Jeremy. (2016) Using Student Writing Reflections to Inform 
             Our Understanding of Feedback Receptivity. Issues in Applied Linguistics. 20(1), 
             91-110.

I chose this article partly because I attended a teaching workshop and a few of the presenters suggested peer review. Also, I have had a few students come in to the Writing Center and it seemed like they had not benefitted much from doing peer review in class. I know I always hated doing peer reviewing in school. I was curious of the usefulness of it and whether to include it as part of my future classroom.

This article did not disappoint for explaining to me the reasoning behind using peer review in the classroom. One of the important things is actually training the students on how to do peer reviewing in the first place. I feel like, in high school, we were just told, “Okay, peer review time,” and maybe given a rubric or something and it did not mean much to me. Walls and Kelley point out that one of the main complaints by students is that they do not trust their peers to actually know what they are doing. By teaching students how to critically review a paper, and not just editing for surface errors, they are then able to apply the skill to reading their own work. Also, when these students know that their peers have gone through the same training as them, they trust the input more.

This study focusses on student reflections on the peer review process. Walls and Kelley were interested, not only in a preference or dispreference for peer review, but what the students actually thought of the process. The findings show that overall students see value in peer feedback with an emphasis on interpersonal dynamics, micro- and macro-level concerns and critical assessment of peers’ feedback.

The students point to the give-and-take nature of it and that a fresh set of eyes can notice something that they have not, such as confusing wording. About half of the students in the study see themselves and classmates as members of a community, either the university as a whole or a group of like-minded individuals working on improving their writing. These students see this interpersonal aspect as crucial to their receptivity of peers’ advice. Most, but not all, of the students recognized that both macro- and micro-level concerns were important. Walls and Kelley point out that training students of what constitutes good peer review, grounded in pedagogical theory, can help when students would otherwise come to it with pre-conceived notions of what are the most important concerns.