Students can improve their papers and receive extra feedback. That is the most obvious reason. But there are other benefits:

• Students learn to share their writing in their drafting stage.
• Students write for an audience that extends beyond the professor.
• Students receive practice talking about writing and learning to review. Both of these are important when learning how to write.
• Students have the opportunity to teach a practice, and teaching a practice is a powerful way of learning it.

II. Questions and Decisions for Structuring Your Peer Review

• Do you want full-class workshops or small-group peer review?
• Do you want face to face response or written response that enables anonymity?
• How can you write a feedback form that harmonizes with your learning goals for the exercise?
• Do you want to keep response groups consistent throughout the semester?

III. Tips for Successful Peer Review

• Model good response by using a short student paper for a full class workshop.
• Provide students with feedback forms to structure their response. Feedback forms should be specific to the assignment.
• Have students create actionable revision plans based on the response they received from peers.
• Ask students to submit a cover letter detailing what peer feedback they used for revisions and why.
• Conduct a debriefing session so the class can assess peer responses that were produced during the exercise.
• Integrate peer response into your class multiple times across the semester, as you are giving students the opportunity to improve as reviewers. Just as students improve as writers, so too do they improve as reviewers.
• Remember that collaborative writing projects build peer response into the fabric of the assignment.

IV. Peer Review Technologies

• My students seemed to have a good experience with Digress.IT to workshop papers.
• The WIDE research center at Michigan State is developing web-based peer review software that my class beta-tested. I am eagerly awaiting the launch.

V. Peer Review Resources

• The University of Hawaii has a list of feedback forms for a number of different writing assignments.
• The University of Colorado has a useful teaching guide to peer review.
• The Dartmouth Writing Program provides a useful way to classify texts here.