Lam, Ricky. "A Peer Review Training Workshop: Coaching Students to Give and Evaluate Peer Feedback." TESL Canada Journal 27.2 (2010): 114-27.ERIC. Web. 31 May 2014.

Using procedures found in other empirical studies, an instructor at Hong Kong University createdpeer review workshop for 30 freshman ESL students. The workshop, consisted of three one-hour class periods over the course of three weeks, taught students how to give and receive constructive peer feedback. The instructor taught students a four-step procedure for giving peer feedback found in another study: clarifying, explaining, and giving suggestions.  This method of learning instruction also required students to break down suggestions and errors into globalized versus localized writing issues, and treatable versus untreatable writing errors. Each week was also a different step in teaching students peer review. In the first week, successful peer review was modeled for the students. In the second week, students explored how to do peer reviews and practiced it on fellow students’ papers. In the third week, students learned how to evaluate peer feedback and how to best implement it. While the students found that keeping logs of peer review and how they implemented into their own work almost doubled their workload, they found the workshop useful overall. Lam also provides some useful suggestions for other instructors who wish to create a peer review process in their classrooms. The use of scoring guides is one suggestion.  Additionally, Lam suggests that using technology like Wikipedias or class blogs could help facilitate peer review and cause students to consider peer review more carefully. These technologies allow a wider audience to see comments made, so students may put more effort into them.

While the participants in this study were ESL students, the author also notes that creating a workshop for peer review would be useful for native English speakers. In an online writing environment, it might be hard to dedicate three weeks of class time to peer review due to the fact that some online courses are more abbreviated, and others are asynchronous and may not allow for as much teacher intervention. The procedure the instructor taught the students and the idea of keeping a peer review log are very useful and could be migrated into an online course. Overall, this article was informative and could be useful for teachers who wish to find a way to teach peer review online.