Peer Feedback Instructions for Research Proposal Assignment

TEAC 800

Peer Feedback instructions for Research Proposal Assignment

The first draft of your Research Proposal Assignment is due to two peers by Sunday, April 20th. The final draft is due on Blackboard by Sunday, April 27th. It is always possible to turn in assignments earlier than the due dates. If you do not have weekend computer access, please work with your peers to exchange your draft and their feedback on a schedule that will allow you to complete the assignments by the due dates.

Author instructions for the peer review draft At the beginning of the drafts you submit to peers, write in italics two or three questions or points of advice that you want reviewer feedback on (e.g., Do I explain the article sufficiently for a reader unfamiliar with the article to understand my critique?' or 'I feel like I'm being repetitive; does it seem to you that I'm making the same point over and over? If so, which repetitions should I chop out or modify?')

Instructions for peer reviewers: For this assignment, please give feedback to your peers no later than Saturday, April 26th. The sooner you get your peers feedback, the more time they have to work on revisions. Each student will be expected to read and offer formative feedback to two classmates on various writing assignments. (Note formative feedback is feedback intended to help the client, in this case your classmate, as compared to summative feedback which judges the quality of an effort for a third party.) We recommend using the ‘new comments’ and ‘track changes’ functions that are built in to Microsoft Word. In addition to any comments inserted in the draft document, be sure that your review explicitly answers the following three questions: (1) Write a narrative response to whatever the author asked you. (2) Compare the answers to this checklist of topics that needed to be covered: (a) abstract (b) identification of topic and author’s interest in it (c) brief description of search strategy (d) summary of articles and reports grouped by subtopics with citations (e) plan for a research inquiry, including methodology and data gathering plan (f) conclusions (g) bibliography (3) Write one or at most two sentences offering your version of what you think the author’s thesis (your peer’s thesis, not the research article’s thesis) is.

More generally, remember these two guidelines: (1) Offer any other comments you want. Remember warm feedback is received more happily than cool feedback, but also that your peer has an interest in improving his/her paper. Comments like, ‘I wasn’t sure what you were trying to say here’ or ‘I don’t see the link between what you’re saying here and what you said earlier that you were trying to accomplish’ or ‘I can read this two ways [offer ways], which did you intend?’ (2) It can be helpful to catch typos (especially spell-check typos like ‘barley’ when you meant to say ‘barely’), but the point here is peer review, not copyediting, and remember you’re looking at a draft.

Author review of peer review (Author’s Notes): At the end of your final draft (i.e., the one you submit on Blackboard by April 27th), please append brief answers to the following six questions (they will determine the peer review grades and give me feedback on the effectiveness of using peer review for this assignment). Those answers do not count towards the word limit:

(1) How did your draft change from start to finish? Please explain the rationale for the changes you made. (2) To what concerns did you pay particular attention as you revised your draft? (Ideas? Structure? Use of research? Grammar and usage?) (3) How did you integrate your peers’ feedback into your revision? Which feedback (and by whom) was especially helpful and why? Which feedback did you decide to reject and why? (4) What do you see as the strengths in your paper? What were your key challenges as you wrote? With more time and energy, what would you continue to develop? (5) Do you think you would want to work with the same peers as peer reviewers for your next paper (next fall)? If not, offer a brief explanation. (6) Rate both of your peer reviewers on the following scale: 0-didn’t do anything; 1-tried to help, but didn’t really; 2-quite helpful. Write a sentence or two to explain each of your ratings.