Peer response activities: Overcoming perceived barriers

Peer response activities are a long-established and well-proven means to improve student writing. In a recent meta-analysis of studies of peer response, Huisman, Saab, van den Broek, and van Driel (2019) demonstrated that across 24 recent studies of the effectiveness of peer response, peer response activities resulted in strong improvements in writing and greater improvements than other strategies like self-assessment. Nevertheless, peer response activities are still the exception rather than the norm.

When asked what stands in the way of incorporating peer response activities, instructors identify three potential barriers to implementation. This tip addresses those three perceived barriers and offers strategies for overcoming these apparent obstacles.

Barrier One: Peer response activities are logistically complex and take valuable class time.

Solution: Use technology to facilitate simple, outside-of-class peer response.

Within Canvas, any writing assignment can include a peer review component. Instructors can manually assign review teams or allow Canvas to assign reviewers randomly. Canvas will also anonymize reviewers automatically. Outside of Canvas, the Google Suite will allow students to share documents and make suggestions using review and response tools. Some units on campus are working with an independent peer response platform, ELIreview.com, to facilitate peer response activities and to develop disciplinary writing skills.

Barrier Two: Students don’t provide adequate feedback (too little) or appropriate feedback (inaccurate/unhelpful).

Solution: Guidance and practice yield effective results.

In the absence of detailed instructions, peers may default to a generic assessment of their peer’s writing and omit descriptive details. The best peer response activities will include:

Explicit description of the task, purpose, and audience for the assignment

Open-ended questions about how and why the document succeeds

• What evidence in the document do you find most persuasive?
• How does the writer provide applications for their conclusions?
• Note: Students can generate their own questions in common by answering "What would you like to know about your work in progress?"

Explicit activities for coaching and revision

Although peers can be trained to approximate the comments of expert reviewers, it is often more beneficial to ask students to describe the textual features they observe in their peers’ writing rather than to engage in peer evaluation. Modeling this descriptive language with a sample document can help students to recognize important features.

In addition, multiple feedback opportunities tend to produce compound effects. The analysis from Huisman et al. illustrated that more peer interaction (responding to multiple peers and receiving feedback from multiple peers) produced greater improvements than interactions between pairs of students.

Barrier Three: Unequal effort exploits strong students and props up weaker ones.

Solution: It’s better to give, and it can be valuable to match.

Some instructors are reluctant to offer peer response activities over concerns about unequal effort. If a highly motivated student matches with a less motivated student, the low-motivation student might reap the rewards of a careful reader while offering little assistance to their high-effort peer.

It turns out that most of the benefits of peer response accrue not from receiving feedback from a peer, but rather through the act of reviewing itself. Research has consistently shown that reviewing peers’ work helps students enter into a more thoughtful and reflective relationship with their own writing. Student writers often report that they engage in revision after a response activity, even in the absence of reviewer comments.

If students are at different stages of their writing on a larger document, asking students to self-report their research progress (just beginning, well underway, nearly completed) can facilitate matching peers with those facing the same questions and issues. Students with more complete drafts can be matched with peers at a similar stage of writing.

Further Support

Interested in designing peer response activities for your class?

Our TWW website has valuable resources on designing peer response activities. Similarly, you can book a consultation with one of our staff to develop activities for your course.

Writing Assignment Hotline (WAH)

Along with our TWW tips, we are pleased to consult with you on writing assignment-related matters. You can schedule an in-person or Google Meet consultation, or you take advantage of our new Writing Assignment Hotline by emailing us a draft of your writing assignment with specific questions you would like us to consider.