Description
Purpose and Content
For this assignment, you will reflect on your previous experience s with peer response, engage with what experts in the field of Writing Studies have to say about peer response, and prepare your own list of best practices for preparing peer feedback. This is a source-based paper that will ask you to draw upon course readings and other pertinent sources. However, this assignment will also ask you to consider your own personal experience as a writer who has both prepared and received peer response feedback.
Audience
Your audience will consist of university students enrolled in composition courses nationwide. In other words, your audience is the same as the audience that Richard Straub was writing for when he drafted “Responding—Really Responding—to Other Students’ Writing” (see the readings). For this reason, you cannot assume that your audience is familiar with Michigan, with CMU, or with our section of ENG 201. You also have to assume that this audience has not read any of the sources you will discuss in your paper. All of these things will have to be explained so that a college student on any campus in the United States could read your paper, understand what you are saying, and benefit from your insights into the peer response process.
Structure and Organization
Your paper will have four sections, each with its own heading. The four sections are as follows:
Section One: Previous Experience with Peer Response
In this part of the paper, you will reflect on your prior experiences with peer response. In other words, you will answer questions like the ones listed below. You don’t necessarily have to answer all of these questions, and you can certainly answer other questions not listed here. The point is to examine your previous experience with peer response and reflect on your assumptions about the value of the process and how it worked. What you do not want to do here is simply respond to the bullet points in the order they are in. These are not outlines of the sections, in other words. THIS IS NOT AN OUTLINE.
Possible questions to consider include:
What is your previous experience with peer response? In which college or high school classes were you asked to prepare peer response feedback?
When previous instructors asked you to prepare peer response feedback, what were their instructions?
What kind of training, if any, did you receive in preparing peer response feedback?
How did the instructor assess or grade your feedback? How do you know?
How were the peer response activities you engaged in structured? For example, did youwork with hard copies of your classmates’ drafts? Or did you work online? Did you work in pairs or groups? Did you prepare feedback during class, or as homework? Were you given a peer response worksheet to fill out? Did you write directly on your classmate’s draft? Some combination of the two?
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ENG 201 Intermediate Composition Project 1: The Peer Response Project Hicks Kennard
What identity or persona did you adopt when preparing peer response feedback? For example, did you try to be like a teacher? A peer? An editor? An expert writer?
What kind of peer response feedback did you receive from your classmates? How useful was this feedback?
What was the feedback you gave to your classmates’ drafts like?
Did your classmates find that your feedback was useful? How do you know?Section Two: What the Experts SayIn this section, you will summarize what the experts (the fours shared sources plus two of your own choosing) have to say about peer response. You will answer questions like these. Again, this is not an outline:
What common themes, concepts, or ideas about peer response run through the sources you have read?
What do the experts say is the purpose and value of peer response?
What do the experts say about peer response in “the academy” (i.e., in all the universitiesnationwide)? In other words, who do they say uses peer response? What do they gainfrom it? How does peer response reflect the values of academia? Why is it so important?
How do the things the experts say about peer response conflict with (or align with) yourprevious experiences with peer response? How do the things the experts say conflict with(or align with) your assumptions about peer response?
What is most surprising about what the experts say about peer response?Because you will be discussing what various experts say, you must include quotations, paraphrases, and citations from the following sources. These sources are available in the weekly reading folders in Weeks 1-3:
“Responding—Really Responding—to Other Students’ Writing” by Richard Straub
“How to Write Meaningful Peer Response Praise” by Ron DePeter
“No One Writes Alone: Peer Review in the Classroom” (the YouTube video from MIT)
“Tis Better to Give and Receive: How to Have More Effective Peer Response Groups” byClint Gardner
At least two additional sources on peer response that you found through your ownresearch. These sources can take any form, including scholarly journal articles, book chapters, YouTube clips, university websites, etc. You can find scholarly sources through CMU Library databases like JSTOR and EBSCO or online databases like Google Scholar. Find sources that actually work for you and not just the first ones you come across.Important note: You must figure out what kinds of sources these are to produce accurate APA entries. Are they chapters in books? Journal articles? Chapters in an edited volume?
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ENG 201 Intermediate Composition Project 1: The Peer Response Project Hicks Kennard
Section Three: Best Practices for Peer Response
In this section, you will take your previous experience with peer response, combined with what we have learned from the experts, to propose a set of six best practices for preparing, sharing, and making use of peer response feedback for your audience (i.e. those students who are still doing peer response ineffectively). In other words, you will describe the specific methods you recommend for peer response this semester based on what you have learned from the experts. Do not simply go back to relying on your previous experience and practices.
Each of your best practices should be backed by at least one citation from a pertinent source. That way, the best practices you recommend will be validated by at least one expert from the field of Writing Studies. Think of this section as your own informed personal instruction manual for how to give effective and useful peer response feedback for those who haven’t had the benefit of learning what you now know. You are the author here—not the expert. You are applying what you have learned from the experts and are now in the position to help your audience do better.
Your audience should be able to carry out an effective peer response after reading your paper. In other words, your practices should be replicable and easy to put into practice. Examples and demonstrations are incredibly important here; otherwise, you will really just be repeating what the experts have said. Feel free to use numbered lists and other organizational strategies in this section.
Section Four: References
In this section, list your sources in alphabetical order. Format your sources and your reference list according to APA Style. This means that the word References will be centered at the top of the page (you maybe have to insert a page break to make this happen). See the Purdue OWL link or a current style guide for more details on this.
Additional Guidelines
As you draft and revise your Peer Response Project, keep these additional guidelines in mind:
Your Peer Response Project should be long enough to get the job done. That said, the suggested length for the paper is 1,500 to 2,000 words.
This is an academic paper, which demands a certain level of formality in your writing. However, that does not mean you have to write like a robot or a zombie. You can use your own voice, complete with the first-person “I,” humor, and examples drawn from personal experience. We will be discussing how the first-person voice is appropriate for many academic writing situations.
You must connect with your audience and not lose track of them. Remember your purpose.
Use metacommentary frequently. This is going to help you with that audience connection. Every single “in other words” in this document is metacommentary. It helps your reader follow along. You do the work so that they don’t have to. There is also metacommentary required as part of the quotation sandwiches.
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ENG 201 Intermediate Composition Project 1: The Peer Response Project Hicks Kennard
Use quotations, paraphrases, and summaries from your sources to support and illustrate the main points of your paper, particularly in sections two and three. Be sure to wrap every quotation in a quotation sandwich. (See “Introduction to Quotation Sandwiches”).
To organize your paper and enhance its readability, use headings, sections, paragraphs, bullet points, and other organizational tools.
Make sure you give your paper an interesting title.
Use APA citation for this paper—this includes both in-text citations and the references(and other details we will look at in class).Completion of the AssignmentIn order to complete this assignment you must demonstrate your ability to do the following:
Reflect on your previous experiences with peer response, describe what the experts say about peer response, and list your own new evidence-based best practices for preparing effective and useful peer response feedback.
Make connections between the sections—reflect on prior experiences, explain what the experts say about peer response, and then show a way forward for your audience. This means there is cohesion across the text.
Draw upon relevant sources to support your assertions about the value of peer response and how to provide effective and useful peer response feedback.
Write for a specific audience—in this case, composition students nationwide who are struggling with peer response usefulness/effectiveness, much like you have been.
Organize the paper into sections with headings.
Integrate quotations into your paper using quotation sandwiches.
Utilize metacommentary consistently and effectively.
Write with clarity, precision, and a minimum of sentence-level errors (less than 3-5); ifyou have too many, you may be asked to resubmit.
Utilize APA style for citing and documenting sources.
Follow the assignment guidelines.Competency in Targeted New SkillsYour Peer Response Project must demonstrate that you know how to do all of these things with a degree of competence commensurate with the expectations for earning your second-year writing competency requirement. If your work doesn’t demonstrate competency in these skills by the final draft, the following deductions from your final course grade could apply. As is the case with everything in this course, once the points are gone, they cannot be made back up:Newly acquired and targeted skills Deductions from final course grade
Use of quotation sandwiches
Use of metacommentary
Use of sources, including additional two you must find on your own APA guidelines
Up to 3 points Up to 2 points Up to 3 points Up to 2 points
