PEER-EDITING OF  STUDENT PAPERS-Instructor's Guide

Do Ahead:  Prepare feedback sheets to guide students in commenting on others' papers.

introduction

When students do intensive editing and rewriting, they learn a great deal about both content and written expression, but the process can take tremendous amounts of faculty time.  Peer-editing is one way to engage students more actively in the editing process, but there can be a  problem that beginning students don't know enough to be able to offer good suggestions to one another.  Beachy (1992) suggests the use of guideline sheets to aid students in their peer-editing.

protocol

This is one protocol that works for peer-editing:

1.  Students are assigned to write a paper and bring two copies of it to class.  They are given the criteria for a good paper, but not in exactly the form to be used in Step Two.  It is best not to hand out in advance the guidelines in exactly the form you will use, because students may then write to the guidelines rather than writing to try to convey their ideas. 

2. In class, students are paired by the instructor; they read and mark up one another's papers, fill out the feedback sheets, and discuss the revisions needed (about 15 minutes for a 2-page paper, 30 minutes for a four-page one).  They hand in the clean copy and use the marked-up copy for revisions.

3.  Each student revises his/her own paper, which is handed in next period with the feedback sheet.

4.  The faculty member evaluates both the revised paper and the quality of the editor's suggestions.  At this point, you can often just use a checklist of the criteria and note "Improved," or "Still needs work," or "Excellent."

what are those guidelines?

Devising the guidelines (feedback sheets) can be very informative. You should spell out your real, underlying criteria for a good paper!  For example, some guideline questions for an introduction were:

•      Does it begin with a statement of broader interest, to draw the reader in?

•      Is the previous literature summarized in some detail?

•      Is the relationship of this experiment to previous work clear?

•      Is the experimental design and the reasoning behind it explained (not all the details, but overall purpose and reasons for choices)?

•      Is there an overall logical flow?

•      Comment on grammar, punctuation, topic sentences, etc.

The results of this process, used repeatedly during the semester, can be impressive.  As one student remarked, "Even if the other person's feedback isn't so valuable, the process of editing someone else's paper helps you write your own paper better."   If the teacher is consistent about using the process, the students take the revisions seriously.  I have found that the writing of students in classes using peer-editing is better-structured and clearer than writing of students in classes that do not, with less effort on my part.

references

Beachy, C.J. 1992.  "Enhancing writing through cooperative peer editing" in N. Davidson and T. Worsham (eds.) Enhancing Thinking through Cooperative Learning.  New York:  Teachers' College Press.  pp. 209-220.