Direction and Misdirection in Peer Response

The late sixties and early seventies saw a concerted attack on the teacher-asaudience. James Moffett claimed that the teacher's authority as evaluator disrupted any natural relationship that a writer might have with an audience.1 Peter Elbow argued for a teacherless writing class where responses came solely from peers.2 In response to these and other attacks, many freshman English textbooks began to identify the audience for writing as someone other than the teacher. Some urged students to consider their peers to be the primary audience; others advised students to define an appropriate audience (peers being one possibility) and to write for that audience. The writing would then be judged by its effectiveness and appropriateness for the intended audience.3 Despite the heavy emphasis on peer evaluation, there has been no systematic investigation of the responses of the peer audience. If students are asked to write for their peers, one must assume that the evaluation criteria used by these peers are consistent with the goals of the writing course. But is this the case? If students approach peers' writing with values, interests, and emphases different from those of writing instructors, the status of the peer response becomes problematical. In order to examine possible differences between instructor and peer evaluations, I conducted a study which posed three questions: