• SWoRD paper writing/reviewing can be added to any course with minimal effort, but a few guidelines should be followed.
• SWoRD activities take considerable student effort.
  • Give appropriate grading weight to BOTH writing and reviewing.
  • If your course already has a high workload, you should remove some other activities in order to make room for SWoRD activities.
  • For a one semester course, unless the primary focus is on writing instruction, only assign one paper with SWoRD.
• Five or six reviews may seem like an unnecessarily large number, but both authors and reviewers benefit from that number.
  • Grades (for authors and reviewers) are much more stable once five reviews are reached.
  • Authors benefit from being sure to have at least a couple very helpful comments.
  • Reviewers benefit from being exposed to a variety of kinds of weak writers and strong writers.
• SWoRD reminds students of upcoming deadlines, but many students find it helpful for the instructor to give a gentle reminder every now and then.
• SWoRD comes with a default rubric for evaluating papers (flow, argument logic, and insight). By contacting us, you can use your own
  rubric, But pay very close attention to the details of your rubric. Students will be (rightfully) annoyed if your rubric doesn't make sense.
• Consider asking students to review this site: Peerfeedback.net - It provides instructions for students on how to give good peer feedback. To make sure students review the site, ask them to summarize the main advice and reflect on whether any of the advice was surprising.
• The main goals of SWoRD for students are listed below. For these goals SWoRD works.
  • 1) improve their writing skills
  • 2) develop some feedback skills
  • 3) have opportunities to explore course content through writing tasks.
• However, peer review is not good for students to learn course content by reading other student papers (at least at the undergraduate level) or to learn course content from peer feedback. If you want to teach course content, that chore is still yours!
• If your only goal is content learning, you might consider having students do 1-pg summary-of-reading assigments. Calibrated Peer Review is a nice system for that kind of writing assignment.

Samples

More disciplines have used SWoRD; we will be adding samples from them periodically.