peer response

Definition:

In composition studies, a form of collaborative learning in which writers meet (usually in small groups, either face-to-face or online) to respond to one another's work. Also known as peer review.

The pedagogy of student collaboration and peer response has been an established field in composition studies since the late 1970s.

See also:

• Collaborative Writing
• Audience
• Audience Analysis
• Audience Analysis Checklist
• Feedback
• Holistic Grading
• Implied Audience
• Online Journals for Composition Instructors
• Writing Center
• Writing Portfolio
• Writing Process

Observations:

• "The teacherless writing class . . . tries to take you out of darkness and silence. It is a class of seven to twelve people. It meets at least once a week. Everyone reads everyone else's writing. Everyone tries to give each writer a sense of how his words were experienced. The goal is for the writer to come as close as possible to being able to see and experience his own words through seven or more people. That's all."
  (Peter Elbow, Writing Without Teachers. Oxford Univ. Press, 1973; rev. ed. 1998)



• "Writing collaboratively has all the characteristics that theorists of cognitive development maintain are essential for the intellectual commitments of adulthood: The experience is personal. The response groups promote intellectual risk taking within a community of support. They allow students to focus on issues that invite the application of academic knowledge to significant human problems. Thinking and writing are grounded in discussion and debate. Reading and responding to peers' writing asks for interpersonal and personal resolution of multiple frames of reference. In this sense, collaborative writing courses at all levels provide an essential opportunity to practice becoming members of an intellectual, adult community."
  (Karen I. Spear, Peer Response Groups in Action: Writing Together in Secondary Schools. Boynton/Cook, 1993)



• Benefits and Pitfalls of Peer Response
  "[A] number of practical benefits of peer response for L2 [second-language] writers have been suggested by various authors:
  
  
  1. Students gain confidence, perspective, and critical thinking skills from being able to read texts by peers on similar tasks.
  2. Students get more feedback on their writing than they could from the teacher alone.
  3. Students get feedback from a more diverse audience bringing multiple perspectives.
  4. Students receive feedback from nonexpert readers on ways in which their texts are unclear as to ideas and language.
  5. Peer review activities build a sense of classroom community.
  On the other hand, researchers, teachers, and student writers themselves have identified potential and actual problems with peer response. The most prominent complaints are that student writers do not know what to look for in their peers' writing and do not give specific, helpful feedback, that they are either too harsh or too complimentary in making comments, and that peer feedback activities take up too much classroom time (or the corollary complaint that not enough time is allotted by teachers and the students feel rushed)."
  (Dana Ferris, Response to Student Writing: Implications for Second Language Students. Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003)

Also Known As: peer feedback, peer review, collaboration, peer criticism, peer evaluation, peer critique