While I would not have had the data - or any data - to back me up before reading this article, I could certainly have argued for the claims made by Brammer and Rees based upon my own experience.
It was only later in college that I learned that peer review was even supposed to be something more than grammar, mechanics, and spellchecking. And only later still, in classes provided by Garfield Re2 School District after I started teaching there (and later here at gradschool in one of Professor Morales' workshops) that I felt I had learned how I could really contribute to someone else's paper through the peer review process.
While I am loquacious to a fault, I think the most effective peer comments I have received - and probably the most effective I have given - have come in the form of simple questions: questions that indicate points where the writing lacks clarity by expressing confusion, for example. However, I wasn't introduced to this form of commenting until these professional development and graduate courses. I was one of the students who would have questioned the value of peer reviews unless I was certain the student I was paired with "knew what they were doing" and unfortuantely was probably not of much use to anyone else.
As Brammar and Rees suggest in their analysis of their results, the difference in these classes was a specfiic forthright discussion of the peer review process, the theory behind it, and the goals it was meant to accomplish. Without this grounding, and without the practice of those skills required, the process remains opaque, students resent it, and most go along with it only because the teacher is insisting that they do so.
One of the more interesting activities that we did with the Teacher's as Writers course in Garfield County was to practice our peer revision/workshop techniques by practicing techniques of critical analysis. When students realize that peer review is based on the same how and why questions that shape critical analysis perhaps a better understanding of both activities will occurr. Certainly as I discussed how and why a given poet was using the techniques she was using as an prelude to workshopping papers with a small group, I approached the papers with a more critical eye, with my mind prepped to ask analytical questions of the text.
While we treat the writing process as important, perhaps our undervaluing the final product prevents us from fully applying hte critical apparatus at our fingertips to revision and peer review. "I can't analyze a student paper!" one might say. "They just don't do enough." However, until we convince ourselves and our students that the papers are in fact worthy of the same analytical treatment as a major literary text (at least for pedagogical purposes), the value of time spent in peer review will continue to be minimal, and the value of the results shallow, and literally superficial: focused upon the surface elements of grammar, mechanics, spelling, and usage.
By forefronting these issues in an area as taken for granted as peer review Brammar and Rees succeed in both reaffirming peer review's value and place in composition pedagogy and delineating for us the importance of approaching it thoroughly and thoughfully if it is to achieve its potential as a learning experience for our students.
I too had my first real peer review experience in a college classroom - it was a creative writing class here at CSU-Pueblo and many of my "peers" were graduate students.
ReplyDeleteI felt as though I had no business critiquing their work, but the professor - David Kepplinger, a published poet - told us it is the writers job to make his or her writing clear to the reader. Though I was not, at that time, an experienced writer, I knew I had been an experienced reader for a very long time.
Maybe that is where we need to begin with our classes and the peer review process - with creating "experienced readers."