Why peer review? 

Feedback is essential to any writing task, especially in the workplace. Whether your students move on to academic careers or other professions, they must be comfortable with the practice of seeking feedback from colleagues. For example, active feedback is integral to the production of scholarly and business communications such as grant proposals, presentations, memos, technical guides, and reports. What’s more, many of the bottlenecks college students face with writing tasks can be addressed through peer review, which helps them further develop the writing skills they need to enter the workforce.  

Unfortunately, peer review activities are not always successful, and many instructors avoid them altogether. Some common reasons for this: 

• Instructors may believe it is unproductive to have students who encounter the same bottlenecks in their writing provide feedback to one another. 
• Instructors may be hesitant or unable to commit the time and energy needed for effective peer review activities, which necessitate advance planning and active participation from students throughout the length of a writing assignment or even a whole course. 
• Students may have difficulty differentiating between feedback and criticism, leading peer review activities to feel intimidating or unpleasant. Furthermore, students who are not confident in their own composition skills may be hesitant to “judge” their peers’ writing. 
• Students may not see the point of peer review because they have been conditioned to value feedback only from their instructors.  

Do any of these concerns hit home for you or your students? The good news is that while designing peer review activities may seem daunting, research suggests that effective peer review can enhance students’ writing education. 

What the research says 

Encouraging students to actively reflect on their own and their peers’ writing can have lasting effects on their development as writers. In Peer Review: Successful from the Start, Shelley Reid notes that peer review “broadens the audience to whom student writers are responsible,” reinforces “the idea that writing is the result of the writer’s choices—which can be controlled and modified,” and increases students’ “awareness of writing as a negotiation between the intent of the writer and the needs of the audience” (2008, para. 5-6). Similarly, WAC Clearinghouse contends that “peer review enhances students’ critical thinking skills as readers and writers... [and] fosters the collaborative awareness of peer readers and their needs” (n.d.).  

Because of the varied ways peer review is implemented in higher ed, the research suggests that its effectiveness varies. Lundstrom and Baker (2009) identified three key benefits of peer review: students receive extra feedback, they have more language interactions, and they improve their own writing by providing feedback to others. However, they also found that the training students got on giving and receiving feedback influenced whether their writing improved overall or globally. “Students who revised student papers improved in specific areas of writing more so than those who only learned to use student feedback” (Lundstrom & Baker, 2009, p. 38). Other researchers have echoed the importance of providing “explicit training in both giving and receiving formative feedback” (Dressler, Chu, Crossman, & Hillman, 2019).  

Ultimately, for a peer review activity to be successful, students must receive training or clear instructions regarding the expectations for the activity. Providing a rubric, working with students to establish criteria, and having open conversations about how to structure helpful feedback can all enhance the peer review process. Asao Inoue (2005) suggests that instructors implement community-based assessment pedagogies in which “students take control of the writing and assessment practices of the class” by contributing to the development of assignments and rubrics. Such methods support students to “evolve as writers, assessors, and theorizers of language” while structured opportunities to evaluate their own writing processes can turn them into “reflective, more self-conscious writers” (p. 210). 

Research also demonstrates that students for whom English is a second language, sometimes called L2 students, can benefit from peer review activities. “Especially popular in L2 instruction, peer response has been shown to help students understand their own process of writing development by analyzing the writing of peers at similar stages in the process” (Anson & Anson, 2017, p. 14 ). Lundstrom and Baker (2009) found that peer review activities help English language learners improve their own writing by “transferring abilities they learn when reviewing peer texts” (p. 38 ). In other words, peer review activities allow English language learners to critically evaluate their own writing through evaluating their peers’ work. 

Ultimately, peer review can help students improve their writing. But to maximize its benefits, students must be trained on how to provide effective feedback and what to do with the feedback they receive. Even if a final product doesn’t show significant improvement, peer review can influence students’ overall development as writers, spurring them to be more self-aware, reflective, and thoughtful about their writing choices and processes.