Brammer & Rees: Lots O' Data

The purpose of this article was to report data on whether or not peer review is useful in composition classes, the teacher perspective vs. the student perspective. The article draws strongly on the idea that Andrea Lunsford subscribed to: collaboration. Whether or not this collaboration is helpful or desirable is the larger question of this article.

Peer reviews have the potential to expand the idea-base and audience-base further, and offer students a prospective different from that of the professor. It can also give weaker writers the opportunity to collaborate with stronger writers. However, as the article says, "institutionalized educational collaboration in whatever form...is never unproblematical" (72). There are, of course, many ways of experiencing a peer review, and not all experiences are positive. The article explains that one of the least successful methods of peer review is to give students a handout and let the students roll with it on their own. It is also a mistake to allow students to think that editing is the goal of peer review, rather than analysis of ideas and content ("brainstorming" (81)). I can understand why students who might have been exposed to negative versions of the peer review might be less than impressed with it.

Another idea presented in the essay was "building rapport amongst classmates" (81). I agree that students are more likely to trust each other and have faith in the criticism received if the teacher encourages this. This would mean accepting that not all peer review time will be productive. In my own experience, about half of the peer review time has been spent getting to know my classmates and joking around, and the other half doing real work, but I received good feedback on my pieces, and they were analyzed through a personal microscope rather than a institutional one. It is true that people are more likely to ask their friends' advice, or a parent, etc., when getting feedback on a piece, so why not make the composition classroom a base for building community amongst classmates?

I have engaged in several peer reviews, myself, in the past, both successful and failed and I think that something that was not presented in this article that I have learned is that we need to teach students that not all feedback is helpful, and some of it will be repetitive, which brings us back to teaching students to be able to discern between constructive criticism and unconstructive criticism. Villamil and de Guerrero "found that 95%" of comments from the peer review were the same as corrections that they might have also made. This means that, as reviewers, the critical side of the brain is working appropriately most of the time, which opens up a whole new set of tools for potential academic writing. 

I fall on the side of "Yay!" to peer reviews, but I agree that they need to be done appropriately, which is a fine line for a teacher to walk.