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| Author |
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Email |
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Institution |
| Josh Lederman |
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ledermaj@emmanuel.edu |
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Emmanuel College
Boston, MA 02115 |
| Stace Budzko |
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budzkost@emmanuel.edu |
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Emmanuel College
Boston, MA 02115 |
| Title: |
New Ideas and Techniques for Peer Reviewing: Empowering Students by Absolving them from Feelings of Judgment |
| Abstract: |
The workshop provides participants with a 60-minute experience in learning and applying techniques designed to help foster their students abilities to provide valuable feedback on their classmates' writing. Through the use of structured, but open-ended surveys, we seek to help the reviewer comments feel less personally directed, while encouraging deeper feedback. In addition we focus on peer-reviewing as a process in terms of the skills it develops in the reviewer, not just as one-time criticism for the writer. |
| Proposal: |
Many college teachers use peer feedback as an effective way of improving student papers. While most composition theorists emphasize the usefulness of this exercise, many also point out difficulties that arise when students are asked to perform this task. Students tend to have a very hard time giving useful feedback to each other (at least on argumentative writing). Cho, et al (2006) write about three major obstacles that get in the way of this process: students don't take the task seriously, they don't feel qualified to provide feedback, and they feel that, ultimately, they are not the ones grading the paper, so their comments don't really matter. One major obstacle we feel they may miss is the notion that pointing out weaknesses in a paper is just mean; this person worked hard on this paper, and a students doesn't want to hurt his or her feelings by telling them that it's ?bad.? (Clearly, another obstacle is the notion that if you point out weaknesses in a paper, that this indeed means that paper is bad. This is another concept that is very hard to get students past.)
However, peer reviewing could be an immensely effective learning tool (both for the writer, and perhaps even more so for the reviewer) if used well. We have found that many of the benefits Vygotsky points out that occur within zones of proximal development can be realized through peer reviewing. Also, as class sizes grow, it becomes increasingly difficult for one teacher to give the personal feedback that each paper deserves. Furthermore, as students advance, it becomes important that they learn to take over ownership of their ability to critique their own works and make improvements accordingly, not simply waiting for the teacher to tell them what is ?wrong? with the paper so they can ?fix? it. Finally, an effective use of peer reviewing can lead to a learning-community feel, in which all students see themselves as having a more interactive role within the classroom.
These last two benefits touch upon one other area that our presentation will emphasize, namely, that peer reviewing is not simply a one-time exercise done to help the writers make their papers better. Rather, we have seen that the greatest effect of peer reviewing seems to be the cumulative effect it can have on the reviewer, who, as he or she sees more and more papers throughout the semester, grows into someone who can spot issue of logic, structure, etc., and hence develops a critical eye for seeing these issues in his or her own work. (This is another way in which we feel that effective peer reviewing can tap into the power of Vygotsky's theory of the zone of proximal development.)
So, in an attempt to reap these many benefits, but at the same time to lessen the negative effects of students feeling judgmental, we have constructed several peer-review surveys that we ask our students to ?fill out? as they read their classmates' work. We try to keep the questions focused on the specific elements of writing that the class is working on at the time, and also keep the survey within the language that we, as instructors, use in the classroom. The idea here is that the reviewer is answering the teacher's question, not telling the writer what is wrong with his or her work, so the reviewer is less likely to restrict his or her criticisms due to feelings of being judgmental. We believe that if we ask the right questions, in the right ways, we can see all of the benefits of a peer review workshop, and hopefully work to decrease the issues that get in the way of this very powerful learning tool.
In our workshop, we will hand out selections from student papers along with the corresponding peer-review surveys. We will demonstrate how we implement this technique in our classes with the hope that participants will find new insights as to how they might improve their own use of peer-reviewing, or even possibly add it into classes where they had not thought of adding it before. The workshop will be interactive in that we will ask participants to play the role of students, both as writers and reviewers, and then we will discuss some of the different ways in which our techniques attempt to lower the feelings of personal judgments, while attempting to highlight the benefit that the reviewer gains from critiquing a fellow classmate's work.
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