A previous question from a teacher related to using the peer-editing process in science class. Jaime Gratton follows up with a summary of her experiences:
I would love to share what I did. I also received some responses and helpful resources from members of the NSTA email lists. For example, Jani replied with “My favorite thing to do is to provide colored pencils and then assign a meaning for the color. For example, anything underlined in red = facts or questions, blue = spelling, green=grammar. So I just have a quarter sheet of what the colors mean. Give them colors and they will edit. Just be careful with special needs kids and who edits their papers. It also makes you see really quickly if someone told the student prior to turning in their final paper they needed to fix things.”
What I ended up doing was taking pieces from each of the responses and resources. I made a peer edit sheet that I thought would work best with the research paper my students were working on.
One thing I did emphasize was the importance of using praise comments, but also making sure that there are suggestions/questions because their goal as a Peer Editor is to make the person’s paper they are editing the best paper they can. I had really good feedback from my students after we did the editing. They really liked using the colored pencils to mark the sections they were reading. They said it was a great visual to see exactly where their mistakes/topic sentences were, as well as other suggestions to improve.
Thanks to Jaime for sharing her Peer Edit sheet. Here are some additional resources:
- Peer Edit with Perfection (Focused on elementary but the suggestions could be adapted to other grade levels)
- Peer Review
- Peer Editing (Focused on secondary students)
- Writing Peer Review (Peer Critique) TOP 10 Mistakes (Students in grades 4-5 humorously demonstrate what not to do.)
- Peer Editing/Review
- Peer Editing That Works
- 5 Reasons Students Should Be Doing More Peer Editing
- Encouraging Peer Editing
I also compiled these links and Jaime’s Peer Editing Sheet into the NSTA Resource collection “Peer Editing.”