By Judit Török, Ph.D, Professor of Philosophy, General Education Director, Center for Teaching and Learning at Pratt Institute
You may encounter an assignment in which you are asked to review a classmate’s paper or project and provide feedback. Providing peer feedback to each other in a safe classroom setting can be immensely beneficial for your learning. It helps you develop and value a process-oriented mindset, allows you to put yourself in the shoes of your readers and provides you with practice in collaborating with others. Additionally, peer feedback helps you become a more effective critical reader as you get better at providing and receiving constructive academic and professional feedback. And of course, you can then apply what you are learning to your own work.
Here are some ground rules:
- As a writer: keep an open mind, critically reflect on the feedback you receive, ask follow-up questions if you don’t understand something, and use the feedback to make revisions to your work.
- As a reader providing feedback: start with a positive statement, don’t be afraid to provide suggestions but be supportive; and remember to be concrete and detailed.
Step 1.
- Begin with a positive statement on your classmate’s work. Point out what you think they did right.
Step 2.
- Talk about the clarity of the overall paper, here are some sample ideas to address:
- Could the readability, clarity, or style of this paper be improved? How?
- Does it have a clear thesis statement?
- Does each paragraph of this paper logically progress from the former ones? Why or why not?
- How clearly does the author express his or her ideas?
- Do you feel this paper relies on evidence, or on opinion or intuition? If the latter, cite examples of where this paper relies on opinion and intuition and give suggestions as to how the writer can write more objectively.
- How smoothly does this paper integrate examples into its own argument? Does it clearly illustrate connections between the evidence it cites and the ideas they support, or does it merely assume them? Explain.
Step 3.
- Finally, add a couple feedback statements that you believe will help your classmate improve their drafts.
- Feel free to use the following sentence starters:
- The most important thing I think you can do to improve this draft is…because…
- One sentence that was not specific enough was… because…
- One idea that you have not fully illustrated with a specific example is…
- I think you could have written more about…. because…
- I wasn’t sure what you meant when you…. because…
- I don’t think you needed to include… because …
- I think you could have used transitional words in the following places…
- One type of grammar and/or punctuation error I noticed in your draft was… Here is one example of this type of error…
