Most of us, I suspect, would agree that the peer review process represents one of the weaker links in the Writing Across the Curriculum Program. Students are often unpracticed in reading critically and that fact, coupled with their understandable desire not to give offense to their classmates, leads them to be too easygoing and superficial in their criticisms of each other. As a result, when students in my History of Science 212 class were asked to comment on peer reviewing, they have usually called it a waste of time at worst, or marginally useful at best.

HOS 212, “The Physician in History,” is a Comm-B course which offers a broad survey of the intellectual and social history of medicine from antiquity through the most recent developments in health care. Its basic format calls for students to receive three 5-6 page essay assignments, one after each of the three units of the course. The first two of those essays requires students to write and revise a complete draft of the essay and participate in peer review. It is in the context of those drafts that peer reviewing – and complaints about it – have entered into the picture.

Over the years, I have gradually introduced a number of changes to improve the effectiveness of peer reviewing. If responses solicited from students immediately afterward have been any indication, these changes have helped make the reviews more forceful and focused.

This impression has been supported too by my TA colleagues who report a high level of engagement by students in the process. Of course, the new attitude may stem from the fact that many UW students today take more than one Comm-B or writing-intensive course during their studies, and hence get repeated practice in peer reviewing. Therefore mere practice, not pedagogical innovation, may be responsible here.

This objection notwithstanding, let me describe how I have tried to help students become better peer reviewers.

Integration of Critical Perspectives into Readings

Of course, nearly everyone at this place claims to be teaching “critical thinking” in one form or another (who indeed would want to claim otherwise?), but science students, who form the bulk of clientele for 212, are often unpracticed in the rhetorically complex form of argumentation deployed in history and other humanities disciplines. Therefore, in the reading guides I distribute during the first several weeks of the course, students are specifically directed to attend to where and how authors signal their arguments, how various sections of a reading are knitted together, and whether the conclusions drawn from the evidence are justified. Teaching assistants in the course support this activity by assigning to the students reading responses aimed toward the same end.

Greater Focus of the Review

For years, I have distributed a form to students, offering guidance about what to look for in papers they are reviewing. In the past, I routinely asked too much of them: identify thesis and topic sentences in the introduction, assess the introduction’s adequacy in providing a “road map” for what follows, evaluate the author’s linkage of one paragraph to another, critique the content and suggest alternatives, note excessive use of passive voice and non-descriptive verbs, and so on. In effect, I was asking them for the kind of critique I would provide myself.

More recently, the guidance to reviewers has become much simpler, focusing on those things in the essay that the reviewer can most easily identify. Our guidelines direct reviewers to a) identify the author’s topic and thesis statements; b) construct a “reverse outline” of the paper, in which the reviewer writes a single sentence stating the main idea of each paragraph; and c) assess how well the paragraph statements in the reverse outline appear to hang together. The reverse outline exercise is especially useful for pointing out to writers where paragraphs are overly long or incoherent.

Modeling the Process

During the week after the first essay assignment has been handed out, I ask TAs to enlist three or four volunteers from their discussion sections to submit an electronic draft directly to me one day earlier than the due date. The lure is that students get to have the instructor as one of their “peer reviewers.” The cost is that one of them will watch me do the review in front of the entire class – anonymously, of course. I then go through the chosen paper paragraph-by-paragraph in lecture, taking care not to do more (well, not much more!) than the students will be doing for each other. This exercise seems to have been successful in showing students what to look for and not shrink back from offering honest, engaged criticism.

Those are the basic elements of what I have done to produce more effective peer reviewing. I would not unconditionally guarantee that the essays produced by students have become are the better for it, but at the very least their willingness to enlist in the process has been greatly increased.