User:Yuchenxu/Peer review

Peer review in writing
Professional peer review focuses on the performance of professionals, with a view to improving quality, upholding standards, or providing certification. Peer review in writing is a pivotal component among various peer review mechanisms, often spearheaded by educators and involving student participation, particularly in academic settings. It constitutes a fundamental process in academic and professional writing, serving as a systematic means to ensure the quality, effectiveness, and credibility of scholarly work. However, despite its widespread use, it is one of the most scattered, inconsistent, and ambiguous practices associated with writing instruction. Many scholars questioning its effectiveness and specific methodologies. Critics of peer review in classrooms express concerns about its ineffectiveness due to students' lack of practice in giving constructive criticism or their limited expertise in the writing craft overall.

Critiques of peer review
Academic peer review has faced considerable criticism, with many studies highlighting inherent issues in the peer review process. This is particularly evident in university classrooms, where the most common source of writing feedback during student years often comes from teachers, whose comments are often highly valued. Students can address various writing issues based on teacher feedback, such as grammar and structure. The effectiveness of feedback largely stems from its high authority. Benjamin Keating, in his article "A Good Development Thing: A Longitudinal Analysis of Peer Review and Authority in Undergraduate Writing," conducted a longitudinal study comparing two groups of students (one majoring in writing and one not) to explore students' perceptions of authority. This research, involving extensive analysis of student texts, concludes that students majoring in non-writing fields tend to undervalue mandatory peer review in class, while those majoring in writing value classmates' comments more. This reflects that peer review feedback has a certain threshold, and effective peer review requires a certain level of expertise. For non-professional writers, peer review feedback may be overlooked, thereby affecting its effectiveness.

Elizabeth Ellis Miller, Cameron Mozafari, Justin Lohr and Jessica Enoch state, "While peer review is an integral part of writing classrooms, students often struggle to effectively engage in it." The authors illustrate some reasons for the inefficiency of peer review based on research conducted during peer review sessions in university classrooms:


 * 1) Lack of Training: Students and even some faculty members may not have received sufficient training to provide constructive feedback. Without proper guidance on what to look for and how to provide helpful comments, peer reviewers may find it challenging to offer meaningful insights.
 * 2) Limited Engagement: Students may participate in peer review sessions with minimal enthusiasm or involvement, viewing them as obligatory tasks rather than valuable learning opportunities. This lack of investment can result in superficial feedback that fails to address underlying issues in the writing.
 * 3) Time Constraints: Instructors often allocate limited time for peer review activities during class sessions, which may not be adequate for thorough reviews of peers' work. Consequently, feedback may be rushed or superficial, lacking the depth required for meaningful improvement.

This research demonstrates that besides issues related to expertise, numerous objective factors contribute to students' poor performance in peer review sessions, resulting in feedback from peer reviewers that may not effectively assist authors. Additionally, this study highlights the influence of emotions in peer review sessions, suggesting that both peer reviewers and authors cannot completely eliminate emotions when providing and receiving feedback. This can lead to peer reviewers and authors approaching the feedback with either positive or negative attitudes towards the text, resulting in selective or biased feedback and review, further impacting their ability to objectively evaluate the article. It implies that subjective emotions may also affect the effectiveness of peer review feedback.

Pamela Bedore and Brian O’Sullivan also hold a skeptical view of peer review in most writing contexts. The authors conclude, based on comparing different forms of peer review after systematic training at two universities, that "the crux is that peer review is not just about improving writing but about helping authors achieve their writing vision." Feedback from the majority of non-professional writers during peer review sessions often tends to be superficial, such as simple grammar corrections and questions. This precisely reflects the implication in the conclusion that the focus is only on improving writing skills. Meaningful peer review involves understanding the author's writing intent, posing valuable questions and perspectives, and guiding the author to achieve their writing goals.

Comparison and improvement
Magda Tigchelaar compares peer review with self-assessment through an experiment that divided students into three groups: self-assessment, peer review, and no review. Across four writing projects, she observed changes in each group, with surprisingly results showing significant improvement only in the self-assessment group. The author's analysis suggests that self-assessment allows individuals to clearly understand the revision goals at each stage, as the author is the most familiar with their own writing. Thus, self-checking naturally follows a systematic and planned approach to revision. In contrast, the effectiveness of peer review is often limited due to the lack of structured feedback, characterized by scattered, meaningless summaries and evaluations that fail to meet author's expectations for revising their work.

Stephanie Conner and Jennifer Gray highlight the value of most students' feedback during peer review. They argue that many peer review sessions fail to meet students' expectations, as students, even as reviewers themselves, feel uncertain about providing constructive feedback due to their lack of confidence in their own writing. The authors further offer numerous improvement strategies across various dimensions, such as course content and specific implementation steps. For instance, the peer review process can be segmented into groups, where students present the papers to be reviewed, while other group members take notes and analyze them. Then, the review scope can be expanded to the entire class. This widens the review sources and further enhances the level of professionalism.

With evolving and changing technology, peer review is also expected to evolve. New tools have the potential to transform the peer review process. Mimi Li discusses the effectiveness and feedback of an online peer review software used in their freshman writing class. Unlike traditional peer review methods commonly used in classrooms, the online peer review software offers a plethora of tools for editing articles, along with comprehensive guidance. For instance, it lists numerous questions peer reviewers can ask and allows for various comments to be added to the selected text. Based on observations over the course of a semester, students showed varying degrees of improvement in their writing skills and grades after using the online peer review software. Additionally, they highly praised the technology of online peer review.