The students accurately identified that the peer feedback was variable in quality. They felt that the comments they received were hit or miss—that is, some comments were helpful, others not at all. For instance, some comments reflected no attention to the writing or showed a lack of understanding of the material. To fix that, one must do something to improve peer-editing ability. The students wrote notes on the papers without following any set form. Thus, they had no guidelines, no specific details that they could latch onto. Writing is composed of so many aspects that it's possible no two editors focused on the same priorities. Improving the quality of responses will involve showing students how to focus on someone else's skills, and I haven't provided enough help with that area.
Students don't value other students' opinion or thoughts as much as they do the instructor's. I think that there is a general reticence to believe peer comments. Students do not respect these because they see no valuation of expertise and thus they view them as neither useful nor informative. In fact, their higher valuation of instructor comments influences lots of components in getting students involved. I've worked on this issue in a couple of ways. First, I've sought advice from places such as the Center for Teaching Excellence. Second, I'm reading a book on teaching that has a section on peer editing. The final note for now is that I plan to return to this issue after the students have had time to read my comments on several papers. I want to get them to a point where they'd seen enough editing from me that they could tackle peer editing through my ideas. I plan to re-introduce peer editing after mid-term when I believe they will have had that exposure.
Peer editors need to give more effort to peer editing, and they don't at the moment because they aren't being evaluated on it. I sensed that they were often doing the peer editing a few minutes right before class. If they give little time to peer editing, it won't help anyone.
Plans for next time:
Build an evaluative process into peer editing. Having students do multiple peer editing of the same paper could augment this: by seeing other’s comments they would have a means to consider what goes into a good peer editing job.
A greater reward structure or a better means to evaluate peer editing. Again, I haven't had time to address this yet.
