I think that assessing whether I improved at reviewing my peers’ work over time is not really possible because I reviewed the work of three completely different people with different writing styles and strengths. This is why some peers have more comments while others I didn’t really have much to critique. I believe that I put effort into all three of my peer reviews and regardless of how many comments or critiques there were, I hope what I said appeared thoughtful to those whose work I was reviewing. One thing I didn’t love about peer reviewing in this course was the glossary of phrases (I wonder… What if…, I’m confused… Unpack/Expand… ABIL…). While these phrases were somewhat helpful in making me think of possible review comments or questions, having to use the specific language sometimes made it harder for me to review. For example, sometimes there was only two things I had to critique about one peer’s paper, but one of the critiques didn’t fall under any of the phrases given. Since we had to fill out two reviews with the phrases, I sometimes had to give critiques that I didn’t really agree with because I had to fill out the whole paper. Otherwise, I think that peer review can sometimes be helpful because different perspectives can help point out things about your paper that either you or the professor didn’t notice. It didn’t particularly help me to receive peer review from my peers, mostly because they had pointed out flaws in my rough drafts that I had already noticed myself and were planning to change for my final draft. However, I do understand and see the benefits of having someone else look over your work.
Below are the peer review sheets that I filled out for 3 of my peers:
