Formative Peer Review
Formative peer review is a collaborative process in which individuals give their work constructive feedback to each other during its development and phase of the work. Thus, this method not only helps to enrich learning and enhance quality but also, by encouraging dialogue and reflection, distances the students from their critical thinking.
The main aim of formative peer review is to deliver feedback that is helpful for authors to enhance their work before it is finalized. This process is a means to enable real participation and analytical thinking, thereby allowing the peers to discern the strengths and weaknesses of each other's work. Such as, students could read the essays of their classmate and recommend places where clarity or argumentation could be improved, thus resulting in better final drafts.
The formative peer review is implemented in the process and it gives emphasis to feedback for improvement, whereas the summative peer review is done after the project is completed in order to evaluate the final product. For instance, instead of the final papers, in an academic context, students may use formative peer review when they exchange drafts of their research papers with one another to defend their thesis statements, but summative peer review would be presenting the completed papers for grading.
Well-structured guidelines, explicit evaluation criteria, and constructive feedback training are the main factors that promote fruitful formative peer review. For example, a rubric that highlights specific focus points can enable peers to provide concentrated and valuable comments. Moreover, the use of resources like peer review workshops or collaborative online platforms can help workload being organized and more manageable to the parties involved.
Working on a formative peer review has many advantages, such as critical thinking skills being better articulated, a stronger grip on the course material, and a boost in the confidence of the students attending their peers' presentations. It fosters a collaborative belonging, where individuals grow from each other's viewpoints. An illustration of this would be a group of authors who participated in a peer review session and might get new ideas about narrative techniques while sharing feedback and thus uplift their storytelling skills.