Peer Review of Paper Rough Drafts

By Derek Faust of Clover Park Park Technical College

Description #

An instructional template for assigning the completion of students conducting a peer review of a research paper. The assignment asks students to suggest improvements to a rough draft and outline of a research paper. This assignment was designed for an Environmental Sciences course, but it could be adapted for a peer review assignment in any topic area.

Assignment #

We will be using an annotation tool called “Hypothesis” to conduct peer reviews of each other’s project paper rough drafts. Here is a Student Guide for using Hypothesis to make annotations/comments. Here is a YouTube video showing how to make annotations/comments using Hypothesis.

For this assignment, you are expected to carefully review and use the Hypothesis annotation tool to annotate comments on the paper rough draft of your fellow student. I will assign you a rough draft to review to ensure that everyone receives peer review comments on their paper draft. Please be constructive in providing comments. The point is to help improve the quality of your and your peers’ papers, not to demean or insult you/them. Your grade will be based on the quality and clarity of your comments. Below are some examples of items you can comment on, but you can also comment on items beyond this list.

  • Grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors.
  • You do not necessarily need to provide corrections to these errors. You may wish to simply point them out, although suggested corrections are particularly helpful.
  • The flow of the paper – Does one paragraph flow into the next or is the transition(s) between paragraphs abrupt?
  • Rough drafts should include a completed Introduction section (at a minimum).
  • Clarity – Point out if a sentence(s) or paragraph does not make sense.
  • Reminder to provide a citation for a statement.
  • Recommendation(s) of additional references/sources.
  • Reminder to format in-text citations and/or references correctly.