Peer Review

Have you ever felt concerned about your ability to provide constructive feedback to every student? Are you interested in building your studentsโ€™ capacity to critically read and engage with each othersโ€™ work? Are you interested in building classroom community and incorporating peer review into your course from the start of the semester? Join the Teaching and Learning Center for a workshop on Making Peer Review Work.

Peer review offers students the chance to receive significant and thorough feedback from a variety of readers while alleviating pressure on the instructor to be the sole source of critique. The process can also strengthen studentsโ€™ grasp of course material and reinforce the communication goals that are often important parts of our courses.

In this workshop, weโ€™ll discuss modes of peer-to-peer work that can be implemented across disciplines as well as peer review strategies suited to a range of focus areas and assignments, including low stake and high stake student writing, problem sets, idea and project development, lab reports, and more.

Please bring any favorite peer review activities and sample writing (your own or a studentโ€™s) for workshop peer review activities.

This workshop was offered in Fall 2016 as an in-person workshop at the Graduate Center, CUNY. The workshop and materials were developed by Avra Spector.

Materials

All materials on this page and in the linked google folder are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) 4.0 International Public License.

This folder contains outreach materials and workshop plans.

Materials Folder: Peer Review Workshop

Workshop Plan

1:00-1:20 Introductions & brief pres/discussion of PR

  • potential of peer review?
  • why peer review, advantages/dangers
  • secondary objectives
  • situating the role of the reviewer

1:20-1:45 Peer Review Activity Iย (essay)

  • Essay / in class one step /person switch

1:45-2:00 discussionย  (lead to: convo about student effort and participation–>incentivizing)

  • Effort + participation
  • Incentivizing
  • Reflexivity of assignment

2:00-2:20 Peer Review Activity IIย  (ideas/problem sets)

2:20-2:30 Discussionย  (lead to: convo about potential problems of bad advice)

  • Potential problems of pr:
  • bad advice, confusing others, etc
  • Size of pr groups

2:30-2:45 Peer Review Activity III

  • With a rubric / and comments / discuss: functionality: reinforces key points of assignment
  • At home v in class
  • Developing types of questions: avoid y/n language

2:45-3:00 Discussion (lead to: facilitating PR) & Survey