Structuring Peer Feedback
Many courses conclude with final projects, and many of us hope our students are already making good progress on those by this point in the term. But we also know that sometimes students wait until the day before the deadline to start, and then we don’t get to see their best work.
To facilitate steadier progress, we can break large projects into steps that include smaller assignments or activities. When students complete projects in phases, they also have more opportunities for feedback and revision. Since we may not always be able to provide all of the feedback our students need, many faculty include peer review assignments or activities as a step in the process.
Peer review can help students better understand assignment expectations and more accurately assess their own work, but many colleagues tell us that their experiences assigning peer review are mixed. They may find that their students focus only on surface features of one another’s work and seem to miss the purpose of the assignment. Their students may gloss over issues that need improvement and provide only positive feedback, or they may be too critical.
To make peer review a more effective learning experience, we need to design it carefully. We also may need to scaffold the process, since students may not have much experience. Before they respond to peers’ work, it’s helpful to look at a sample or two together, perhaps first in small groups and then as a whole class, so that students understand what the project involves, what they should be looking for, and what kinds of feedback will be useful. You may want to facilitate a discussion of what makes feedback constructive, and what may be counterproductive. Ideally the examples you choose for practice should have room for improvement. This fosters a developmental approach and helps students see the value of review, feedback, and revision. It can help them reflect on what’s working well in their own work and what they can improve.
We can design and facilitate peer review activities for different purposes, so we need to structure the activity to focus students’ attention where we want it to go. It helps if we start by clarifying the purpose of the assignment and also of the peer feedback process. What are we hoping to achieve?
For example, we might want to help students become more familiar with the components of the assignment. They don’t have to evaluate their peers’ work in order for peer review to be useful; they may be simply identifying and describing some aspects. This can be valuable for helping them understand what an assignment should include and what those components look like, especially if it’s an unfamiliar or complex task. We can provide specific questions in order to direct students’ attention. If they’re working on an argument, for instance, does the paper they’re reviewing have a thesis? Can they find it? Does it provide evidence? What kinds? How did their peer incorporate the evidence? Did they connect the evidence to the claim? Can they locate a counterargument? And so on.
If students tend to struggle with a particular aspect of the project, or if you think they need extra scaffolding for part of the task, you may want to focus their attention on that facet. If they often have difficulty disentangling the results section of a paper from the discussion section, for example, you can provide guidance with very targeted questions. Perhaps an assignment asks students to analyze two theoretical approaches and explain why one is more appropriate for the given scenario, but they tend to merely describe the two theories. They may not understand what kinds of thinking they need to be performing, and targeted questions can help them see it more clearly.
Your goal for peer review might be to help students understand and apply the rubric. After you’ve practiced on a couple of examples as a class, students can use the rubric to assess classmates’ papers (or their own). Practice evaluating peers’ work can also help them self-assess more accurately, as they begin to gain a sense of what successful work needs to accomplish.
Another goal of peer review might be to help students give effective feedback, or accept and make use of feedback. You might want to give them guidelines for feedback, for instance helping them practice a readerly approach that asks questions (“could you give another example?”) and frames responses as first-person reactions rather than editorial critique (“This example was more persuasive for me than the other,” or “I got a little lost here.”) If you want students to make good use of the feedback they receive, you’ll probably need to build in a reflective stage to the activity, asking them to summarize the feedback and explain how they plan to implement it. If they’ve gotten multiple reactions that seem to contradict one another, they’ll need to consider what feedback they consider most valuable and why, and how they plan to make use of it.
When peer review is thoughtfully designed and facilitated, it can be a meaningful learning experience that clarifies students’ understanding of our expectations and helps them to make more intentional revisions. The additional structure pays off in more productive interactions between students, and stronger student work. If you’d like support in designing peer review activities that align with your goals, or thinking through how to scaffold the process for your students, we’d be happy to help. Please reach out to us at pro-teaching@fsu.edu. We look forward to working with you!
2026 Provost’s Showcase of Scholarly Teaching
Friday, April 17th | 1:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. | Strozier Library Basement
Pre-event Social Hour: 11:45 am-12:45 pm | Presentations: 1:00 pm-5:00 pm
Please join us for the 2026 Provost’s Showcase, where faculty and graduate TAs will share their innovative teaching practices. This event will feature 31 poster presentations and 18 roundtable discussions that highlight the impressive advancements in education happening at FSU. Please come to support and learn from your colleagues! Main themes of these presentations and discussions include (1) innovative instructional design and assessment, (2) student success, support, and engagement, (3) experiential learning, professional development, and mentorship, and (4) AI & VR in teaching and learning. It will be a wonderful experience to learn from each other. The pre-event Social Hour starts at 11:45 am, and will provide a networking opportunity over complimentary refreshments.
No pre-registration is needed. We look forward to seeing you there!