Peer Review Feedback Assignment
Goal: Provide feedback for 2 drafts of literature reviews. The literature review is about an organizational communication issue.
Guidelines
1. Students will receive blind copies of 2 rough drafts.
2. What to include in your reviews?
Write a short introduction to the author about the topic/premise of their work.
Help the author understand what is unclear and what is successful in their literature review. You are not just summarizing, criticizing, or praising the work. You are providing an outside perspective on the paper.
Address writing quality and errors. Fixing spelling and grammar errors should not be the primary focus of this assignment, but you should provide feedback if sentence structure or the organization of main points is unclear.
My professor’s guidelines: Blind Peer Review Assignment
Hi everyone,
I sent out an email to everyone with your peer review assignment attached. The instructions are available on the assignment page, but I copied and pasted some reviewing guidelines from the International Communication Association (ICA) below. This is not a perfect comparison to what you are doing since you’re reading drafts Instead of full papers) and not worried about rejecting papers, but I think it can be very helpful. This is an organization I’ve presented at and regularly review for and believe they have the best guidelines for reviewing. Please note that some formatting was messed up on some papers when I removed identifying information (especially when I had to convert from PDFs) so don’t worry about commenting on those mistakes.
How does one write a useful, robust review? A good review should be at minimum three sentences (a short review, even if positive, is not helpful to the authors). Your review should do the following: summarize the submissions main points (signaling to authors that you have read the work and tried to understand it); assess the paper/panels contribution in terms of relevant past work; and mention at least one thing that the submission does well (even if you are ultimately recommending it be rejected).
BEST PRACTICES
* Be generous with your time…and your words. Please remember that authors–and the field, and your division–are best served by reviews that give constructive, qualitative feedback. Everyone is spread thin, but please try to give yourself enough time to give thorough and detailed feedback to each submission.
* Dont be Reviewer 2. One would think this goes without saying but.every year, we encounter one or two reviews (out of thousands of great ones) that are just viciously cruel. If youre not in the right headspace to review (and we get it, the pandemic is just another thing that adds to the daily stressors of academic life, and sometimes we all feel like were at our breaking point) then dont review anything until youre feeling better able to handle it. This is for your mental health and for the sake of the person on the other end. Always remember that there is a human being on the other end of your review, someone who wants their work to get better, will benefit from your constructive critique, and might never forget something searing you said about their work.
* Confront your subject-matter biases. Before you start reading each submission, please check in with yourself to make sure you are aware of your (otherwise unconscious) biases.
I’m gonna attach 2 copies of my peer assignment below. You will have 2 pages (4 pages in total) to write for each blind review.
