Peer Review: More of a headache or more of a help?

In a perfect world, in a perfect school district, in a perfect classroom...you get the idea, peer review would be fantastic. I am not a proponent of peer editing, reviewing, revising, or cooperative groups in the classroom. I feel this way for many reasons. Besides the obvious of keeping the kids on task and classroom management, time is definitely an issue. When we are held accountable for state assessments that determine our accreditation status, I'm sorry peer review is not the method I want to use in student writing. But enough of my rant and rave, I need to comment on the literature.

"Peer Review from the Students' Perspective: Invaluable or Invalid" gives us an insight into what peer review can possibly do for students. The article lost me once in got into percentages and figures, but I gathered that both instructor and student saw some need for peer review and no need for peer review past freshman year. I think the study was skewed to begin with because the university did not reflect a population found at most state colleges and universities. So therefore, I did not find this accurate or believable in the least.

However, based on the information, peer review is somewhat beneficial. There are many conflicts, though, found in peer review. Are the students the ones who are responsible for their peers' education? Peer editing is great when the students know what to look for; but as the article states students are only looking at what they know, grammar/conventions. If students need to be taught to think, then how on earth can they teach each other how to write? Many students will say, much like those in the study, that peer review is not beneficial and causes the writing to decline in style and structure.

As a teacher, in public education at the secondary level, I do not have the desired and needed time to teach my students how to peer review. I need to teach them how to think, write, and read. How are they going to teach each other? On the flip side, cooperative grouping is very beneficial to solving problems. This method may work if the student writing sample is not from the same class. Students do need to see models of good and bad writing in order to understand which is which and why. Once guided practice in complete, then students can use cooperative groups to determine what makes the writing good and what makes it bad. Then independent practice can take place and possibly peer review. I myself have personally used this method of cooperative learning.

I must say, though, the audience the student is writing for is never his or her peers, it is his or her instructor who ultimately gives the grade. I agree with the article that much has to be done by both teacher and student in order for true peer editing, revising and reviewing to take place.