Dr. Ann Obermann
In social work, giving and receiving feedback is part of our practice. We are called on to offer evaluation of treatment, progress, outcomes, parenting, coping skills, and many other sensitive areas of growth, change, stagnation, or discrimination. These evaluations are offered to clients, peers, our systems, ourselves, and our programs. It is essential for students to learn how to offer and receive effective feedback.
In addition to the social work competency, peer feedback offers many pedagogical benefits for learning and classroom community. Using peer review can meet different learning goals, 1) Teaching students how to edit, use APA, and improve their grammar; 2) Instructing students how to formulate and give feedback; 3) Instructing students how to receive feedback and choose which feedback to integrate; 4) Reinforce content learning through students teaching students; 5) Reinforce rubric requirements by having students review the rubric in others writing; 6) Improve submission quality, decreasing grading time for instructors.
Benefits for Students:
- Helps students with their own learning when they “teach” or review others work
- Helps students see there are many writing styles and different voices
- Helps students learn APA & grammar by looking for errors and offering corrections
- Creates skills of giving constructive feedback
- Creates skills of receiving constructive feedback
- Adds a step in the process to teach students drafting and requesting feedback
Benefits for instructors:
- Offers new perspectives for student learning and instructor learning
- An applied activity for students to learn about feedback
- Drafting and reviews to improve student writing, makes grading easier
- Opportunity for student interaction
- Decreases grading load of assignments and editing of papers
- Multiple opportunities for students to improve and learn
With each of the learning goals mentioned above, instructors will need introduce and teach peer review in a different way and to make clear, to students, the purpose of their peer review. The following offers some tips to make peer review successful.
Instructors must teach students HOW to give feedback and conduct a peer review as students struggle with reviewing assignments and providing feedback. By making the intent of the peer review clear to students, the high levels of anxiety will decrease. Students get very nervous about having others read their work and in giving feedback to their peers. Many times, students feel like imposters when offering feedback to someone they feel is a better writer or student. The instructor must discuss these feelings and encourage students to be self-aware, but to move forward with the assignment as they all have something to offer one another. Consider doing your first “peer review” together in class, synchronously, or in a video lecture demonstration so that you can walk students through the process and reduce the pressure students feel when first learning to review each other’s work. Discuss the trust and vulnerability that is required for this process and that it is very normal to feel nervous about this activity.
To create success in the assignment, instructors should be very specific for peer review tasks, some follow peer review rubrics or suggestions. Are the peers reading for organization, APA, grammar, flow, content, etc. Though some peer reviews focus on editing and content, this can be overwhelming for a student’s first peer review. Consider focusing on just one area of review. Peer reviewers can concentrate on offering 2 compliments and 2 – 3 constructive comments about the paper, with the 2 compliments sandwiching the 2 constructive comments.
When students can “teach” in the form of peer review, their learning increases as they apply what they have learned. Below you will find many resources for creating peer review assignments in Canvas to guides about when and how to use peer review.
Resource Guides for Peer Review:
- https://writing.colostate.edu/guides/teaching/peer/index.cfm?teaching_guides_active=classes&teaching_guides_active=classes
- https://serc.carleton.edu/sp/library/peerreview/tips.html
- https://serc.carleton.edu/sp/library/peerreview/what.html
Tools for Peer Review:
- Peer Review in Canvas: Canvas has an assignment designation for peer review. It makes it easy to “assign” peer review as part of their process, letting you see all the feedback given and integrated.
- Hypothes.is: Students could use hypothes.is to “annotate” one another’s papers. I find this more helpful for demonstrating what I look for when I review a paper. Or students could practice the peer review process on an example paper, learning to identify areas of improvement and offer feedback.
- Word: Students can exchange papers and use track changes for peer review.
- Google Docs: In addition to track changes in google docs, you could have the full class edit a paper together in “shared” docs during an online class to see what folks are noticing and offering feedback for. Like Hypothes.is, GoogleDocs could be used as a teaching tool for peer review.