Peer Response

Peer response is a staple of composition and WAC programs across the U.S.A.  Professors use peer response because, most of all, it heightens students' engagement with course material. Peer response, if used well, can help to create a community of writers.

The University of Hawaii at Manoa provides sample rubrics professors developed in American Studies; Philippine Literature; Civil Engineering; Art; Poetry; Sociology; and Spanish. See also Faculty Guidelines for Peer Response from the SFSU WAC Program.

Calibrated Peer Response was designed to incorporate writing to learn in large chemistry classes. Science professors can register on this website and take a tour.

The following advice is gleaned from studies of peer response in WAC programs nationwide.

1) Peer Response is most successful when it is used to expose students to how a live audience responds to their work. It is less successful when it is used as an evaluative tool of a product. The goal of peer response is to help students to revise a draft before it is due as a final paper.

2) Peer response is most successful when it occurs in the context of related writing activities that give students practice with required forms BEFORE they review one another's work.  This link will provide ideas of what you can do to PREPARE students to do peer response. They have to LEARN how to approximate the responses of expert readers. See the SFSU WAC Program's Student Guidelines a professor can give to a class to contextualize peer response.

 2) Some professors find it most helpful to target peer response to specific phases of writing a paper or specific parts. In these cases, peer response might occupy only a small part of a class and be repeated throughout the semester. For example, soon after an assignment is given, peer response might focus on brainstorming ideas; when a draft is due, peer response might focus on clarifying the major ideas and on evaluating the quality of sources ; when a final product is due, peer response might focus on editing and proofreading. Asking students to evaluate whole papers can be overwhelming, especially if students haven't learned how to respond.

3) Peer
response is most successful when professors try it more than once and
experiment with the pedagogy until they find the kind of response that
suits their approach in class.