Assessing the Quality of Peer Feedback Thomas Quinlan 1 , Russell Almond 2 , Diego Zapata-Rivera 2 1 The College of New Jersey, 2000 Pennington Road, Ewing, New Jersey, 08628, United States quinlant@tcnj.edu 2 Educational Testing Service, Rosedale Rd., Princeton, New Jersey, 08541, United States ralmond@ets.org ; dzapata@ets.org Abstract. Peer review activities are almost ideal for supporting writing instruction. However, they also have a glaring weakness: quality of peer feedback. An obvious way to increase the quality of peer feedback is to improve students’ reviewing skill. For peer review activities, students must obviously receive instruction in how to review classmates’ essays. However, this instruction must be on-going, since reviewing is a very complex skill, developing slowly over time. This raises a question: How to assess the quality of students’ reviewing. Developing methods to measure students’ reviewing skill, in the context of peer reviewing, could open important possibilities for classroom assessment. In order to ensure that student- writers receive high quality peer feedback, it is necessary monitor the performance of student-reviewers. This presentation will discuss two methods for assessing the quality of peer feedback. Keywords: Writing instruction, assessment feedback Peer review activities are almost ideal for supporting writing instruction. The skills required for reviewing a classmate’s essay should readily transfer to reviewing one’s own essay. In their original conception of writing competency, Hayes and Flower [1] used the term ―reviewing‖ to describe evaluation geared to revising, by which the writer improves the text. Reviewing involves evaluating the myriad of linguistic dimensions that influence the quality of the text, such as the organization of ideas, sentence fluency, and word choice. (In contrast, editing concerns the correcting of grammatical and mechanical errors.) Peer review activities certainly provide practice in reviewing. Further, backed by considerable research evidence, peer review activities can be counted among ―best practices‖ of writing instruction [2, 3, 4, 5]. In addition, peer review activities have the potential for lightening teacher’s workload, in terms of scoring and feedback. With the possibility of online peer review systems, we can begin thinking about writing assessment as distributed across students in the classroom. However, peer review activities also have one glaring weakness: the uneven quality of peer feedback. The validity of any assessment depends upon the inferences one draws