TEAC 800
Peer Feedback instructions for Research Analysis Assignment
The first draft of your Research Analysis Assignment is due to two peers by Sunday, March 2nd. The final draft is due on Blackboard by Sunday, March 9th. It is always possible to turn in assignments earlier than the due dates. If you do not have weekend computer access, please work with your peers to exchange your draft and their feedback on a schedule that will allow you to complete the assignments by the due dates.
Author instructions for the peer review draft
At the end of the draft you submit to two peers, write in italics two or three questions or points of advice that you want reviewer feedback on (e.g., Do I explain the article sufficiently for a reader unfamiliar with the article to understand my critique?' or 'I feel like I'm being repetitive; does it seem to you that I'm making the same point over and over? If so, which repetitions should I chop out or modify?')
Instructions for peer reviewers:
For this assignment, please give feedback to your peers no later than Saturday, March 8th. The sooner you get your peers feedback, the more time they have to work on revisions. Each student will be expected to read and offer formative feedback to two classmates on various writing assignments. (Note formative feedback is feedback intended to help the client, in this case your classmate, as compared to summative feedback which judges the quality of an effort for a third party.) I recommend using the ‘new comments’ and ‘track changes’ functions that are built in to Microsoft Word. In addition to any comments inserted in the draft document, be sure that your review explicitly answers the following three questions:
(1) Write a narrative response to whatever the author asked you.
(2) Compare your peer’s text to a checklist of topics that needed to be covered in the assignment:
(a) article citation
(b) bibliographic summary of the article (1-2 paragraphs)
(c) statement of the research problem(s) addressed
(d) identify research setting
(e) identify research investigators
(f) identify research methods
(g) discuss generalizability
(h) discuss research purposes
(3) Give your peer two things to think about related to his or her writing.
More generally, remember these two guidelines:
(1) Offer any other comments you want. Remember warm feedback is received more happily than cool feedback, but also that your peer has an interest in improving his/her paper. Comments like the following are helpful: ‘I wasn’t sure what you were trying to say here’ or ‘I don’t see the link between what you’re saying here and what you said earlier that you were trying to accomplish’ or ‘I can read this two ways [offer ways], which did you intend?’
(2) It can be helpful to catch typos (especially spell-check typos like ‘barley’ when you meant to say ‘barely’), but the point here is peer review, not copyediting, and remember you’re looking at a draft. Pay attention to spelling and grammar, however, this should be a minor part of your feedback. You may use the “track changes” feature of Word to fix such items.
Author review of peer review (Author’s Notes):
At the end of your final draft (i.e., the one you submit on Blackboard by March 9th), please add brief answers to the following six questions (they will determine the peer review grades and give us feedback on the process of peer review).
(1) How did your draft change from start to finish? Please explain the rationale for the changes you made.
(2) To what concerns did you pay particular attention as you revised your draft? (Ideas?Structure?Grammar and usage?)
(3) How did you integrate your peers’ feedback into your revision? Which feedback (and by whom) was especially helpful and why? Which feedback did you decide to reject and why?
(4) What do you see as the strengths in your paper? What were your key challenges as you wrote? With more time and energy, what would you continue to develop?
(5) Do you think you would want to work with the same peers as peer reviewers for your next paper? If not, offer a brief explanation.
(6) Rate both of your peer reviewers on the following scale: 0-didn’t do anything; 1-tried to help, but didn’t really; 2-quite helpful. Write a sentence or two to explain each of your ratings.