A Quick Look at US College's Peer Reviews

Each college has its unique ideas about peer reviews. Every professor works within that college to make their student's writing better. By experimenting with ideas we learn and peer reviews are no exception. Many universities are experimenting with new ways to make students excel at peer review and with today's Gen Y'ers operating computers at ages as young as seven, it is only natural that the process of peer review, like the Internet, would evolve. So this page gives a brief synopsis of a few sample colleges with interesting peer review ideas.

Colorado State University Emphasizes a Step-by-Step Peer Review Process

Identifying one major feature per peer review sometimes makes students feel most comfortable-by moving through a sequence from simply identifying a feature, to evaluating it, to suggesting revisions can emphasize the importance of the elements of a good paper by implementing the different elements slowly, with each task. Creating each workshop a sheet so that it builds upon the prior one and the students learn slowly, absorbing the information. And as you design these worksheets, label each level of task clearly so that students know if they are to identify or suggest revisions as part of a given peer-review session.

http://writing.colostate.edu/guides/teaching/peer/

North Carolina State University

This university uses what they call a "PG, a portable, Web-based peer-evaluation system written in Java, which provides for peer review of homework over the Web. Reviewers and authors communicate double-blindly via a shared Web page. At the end of the review process, the reviewer assigns a grade to each author whose work (s)he has reviewed. A student’s grade is the average of the grades given by the reviewers, plus an incentive described below to encourage good

reviews. The ability to submit directory hierarchies allows large projects to be submitted as easily as small ones. Classes can do different work (research different topics, for example), they sign up over the Web for their chosen topic."

University of Hawaii, Monoi

"Journal editors provide criteria lists to guide reviewers’ comments and evaluations. You can similarly guide your students’ feedback on each other's drafts by providing them with a list of characteristics that are key to their success on the assignment. Such lists have the added benefits of promoting students’ familiarity with characteristics of writing that are important in your field and of making explicit your evaluation criteria." An example of this would be giving the thesis three words-strong, weak, unclear-instead of making them think up ways to describe the problems make them decide what's wrong with it to begin with instead of worrying how to explain something they may not understand.

http://www.mwp.hawaii.edu/resources/wm7.htm>

Hamilton College, New York

Hamilton College suggests educators to urge their students "to informally outline the structure of the argument. Start by identifying the thesis, then outline the main ideas in the discussion to see the overall logic of the argument as well as identify the paragraphs that have either no central idea or more than one." Another tip this college suggests is to have the writer and reader talk one on one and have the reader actually ask a list of questions to better understand the intent of the paper. The reader should then write down the answers to get the writer's thoughts on paper, so they can go back over it and make sure the writer's intention and the actual paper are coherent.

http://www.hamilton.edu/writing/index.html

Oxford Brookes University

This particular university partly emphasizes the importance of self reviewing. Peer review is helpful, but a student will help their peer better if they can accurately analyze their own work in an controlled setting where they can concentrate on the draft. "If you develop students' ability to judge their own performance early in the course, this should lead to a general improvement in their achievement. After students leave higher education, they are likely to be heavily reliant on their own judgement of themselves and their peers, to estimate how effective they are in a wide variety of professional contexts. For these reasons, it is important that these skills are developed; assessment strategies should aid this development." An example to better help the student review his own work is to show both good and bad papers with a professor's marks already made and explain why the grades were given. The process of evaluating their own work then swapping with a class mate directly after helps reinforce what to look for in grading. They do an informal review, then document the changes they made due to the peer review. By reviewing their own work then having someone else do it, they become involved in the learning/teaching process.

http://mw.brookes.ac.uk/display/eswaf/Discussion+Topics

Cornell University

Cornell University and Penn State have worked in conjunction to create an online program for improving high school peer reviews. The site is actually a bigger Environmental Inquiry for students from everywhere to post scientific and bioscience essays to review. The students download their papers and have a minimum number of students and faculty to read and comment online, where not only can the student read and learn but all students. It is to work in conjunction with a normal in-class peer review. To see their website, click here.

http://ei.cornell.edu/toxicology/peerreview/default.asp

An interesting last side note is the emergence of online peer review systems. Just a quick overview can reveal that many high schools and some universities pay for an online company to create a sort of template peer review program for their classes. A surprising amount of schools are incorporating this into their programs. For a list of schools who use this program click on the files list and download software client list. To go to the actual website of this company, click here. http://turnitin.com/static/home.html