"If each group displays its work in some way, students can be taught what criteria are legitimate and how to give constructive criticism. This strategy enables the group to obtain feedback at the same time that it teaches a valuable intellectual and social lesson to the class." p. 10, chapter 5
I found this section on peer review to be very interesting to me because it can be so beneficial to the students if done correctly and appropriately. Peer review can be very hard for some students because they don't want to hurt anyone's feelings or like the article said, some students can be "merciless". When working in a group setting, I think that peer review is a necessary process. I have actually had some experience with this in my internship. Twice now, our home base of 50 students has paired up with the home base next door of 50 students to work on team building activities in which they are assigned a group and are given a task with little verbal instruction. They have to work together and read the directions carefully in order to successfully build the final product. At the end of the task, each student writes in their writer's notebook 3 things they did well as a group, 3 things they did not do so well as a group, 1 thing they themselves contributed, and 1 thing they could work on. After completing this, they shared with their group members. When the groups got back together for the second team building activity, they brought out their writer's notebooks and pointed out what they need to work on this time around. I found this to be a very valuable way of peer evaluation for the student's.
It's very important for students to learn at a young age how to reflect on the work that they do, learning to judge quality work for themselves and using their judgments to make changes to their work habits in the future. Sharing their work with other students is a good way for them to not only understand the thinking of others better, but to also understand their own thinking better through comparison to others. This is a valuable experience whether students are sharing mathematical solutions, observations in science, or peer editing in writing. It's good that your class has had the opportunity to work in groups so early in the year to start building these skills. It's even better that they had the opportunity to self reflect afterwards on the work they did in these groups.
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