SQR 2

Vanessa Magdaleno
ENG 1301. 28
Instructor: Trang Phan
9/12/10

“Peer Response: Teaching Specific Revision Strategies”

SUMMARY:

Gloria A. Neubert and Sally J. McNelis. "Peer Response: Teaching Specific Revision Suggestions." The English Journal, Vol. 79, No. 5. (Sep., 1990), pp. 52-56

In today’s classrooms’ we find teachers using group activities for students to respond to peers’ drafts. Are these group sessions substantially helping, or are the suggestions that students are giving vague and ineffective. Gloria A. Neubert and Sally J. McNelis performed a study to teach junior high students to offer effective, specific responses when revising their peers’ papers.
A technique that was used frequently with older students was “PQP-Praise-Question-Polish”. The outcomes of this critiquing technique were focused and positive students offering specific revision comments. However, when introduced to junior high students, a different outcome occurred. This technique did in fact keep students on the right track, but responses were considerably vague. The responses were analyzed and categorized as “vague,” “general but useful”, or “specific”. A narrow 28% or students’ comments were “specific”, 53% were “general but useful,” and 19% were “vague.”
Neubert and McNelis set out to develop students to give specific revision comments. Total class activities took place showing students responses and asking them to distinguish which ones were most useful. Small0group activities were then introduced where students were put in groups and had to explain why responses were “effective” or “not effective”. Individual work was the final activity. Students had to formulate specific responses that would be useful to the writer. The revisions were shared and evaluated by the class.
After the following response session, specific responses reached and improving 60%, “general but useful” lowered to 34%, and only a mere 6% of students gave “vague” responses.

QUESTION:

Throughout your middle school and high school education, when revising peers' work, did your instructors put emphasis on how to revise? If not, how can Neubert and McNelis' article help teachers show students how to be specific in responses and how to give good suggestions to their peers?


RESPONSE:

Peer review shouldn’t be only based on making changes to grammatical errors or spelling errors, but when a teacher asks a middle school student to correct a paper, it’s pretty typical for a student to respond to a peers’ paper by giving vague suggestions. From the beginning of my middle school years, all the way to graduation, my teachers always gave assignments on revising our peers’ work. My class never took it seriously. Personally, I viewed revising and fixing, as the “teacher’s job”. I didn’t go out of my way to improve a classmates’ paper because I knew the teacher would go over it anyway, and fix it herself. I didn’t know the correct way, and would only look for small spelling errors. Our teachers’ focus on revising was mostly on correcting incorrect spelling, grammar, and punctuation. We weren’t taught to give specific comments that give our peers direction for changes. Thinking back, all my responses to peers’ would have been considered “vague” and didn’t have much detail. After reading this article I realized how much help I could have given to a fellow student if I was taught how to.
Neubert and McNelis’ article is a great way to explain to students differences between vague, general, and specific comments. It definitely opened my eyes, as well as my classmates’ eyes to a fact that what we have been doing all along in revising, has not been as helpful as it can be. Peer collaboration is a great way to discuss give, seek, and react to oral feedback among each other, but doing it the right way can help to reach its highest potential. If teachers do a lesson on how to correctly revise a peers’ paper, this article would definitely be a great tool and resource. It can introduce the critiquing technique of “Praise-Question-Polish” which is a wonderful organizational technique to use to help students focus.