How Eli Review Works

Eli Review’s workflow and features turn the classroom into a studio where instructors can see engaged peer learning. Instructors can provide students with more practice, more feedback, more revision, and more coaching. In this case, more equals better—better feedback, better writing, better writers.

Step 1

Assign and Write Small Bits

Create bite sized-writing tasks in Eli Review to help guide your students through large projects and focus their attention specific learning goals. You can coordinate write-review-revise cycles to encourage more timely feedback and revision.

Students develop their work in pieces and build toward a full draft. Students can type, paste or upload a wide variety of file types.

Pedagogy: Feedback and Revision Technology: Creating Writing Tasks in Eli Review
Timeline Donuts Writing and reviewing small bits leaves more time for feedback and revision.
Step 2

Guide and Give Feedback

Students learn to give helpful feedback through explicit instruction and practice. You can create reviews that function like surveys to guide reviewers, focusing their feedback on the important criteria for learning.

Use checklists, ratings, and prompts for contextual and end comments in any combination to focus students attention in ways that match your learning goals.

Pedagogy: Designing Effective Reviews (instructors), Becoming a Better Writer (students) Technology: Creating Review Tasks in Eli Review
Adding a Rating Scape Instructors guide feedback by creating detailed prompts.
Step 3

Process and Debrief Feedback

With Eli Review, you see formative data in real-time while a review is going on. You can use this information to make evidence-based decisions on how and when to coach writers and reviewers toward improvement. Endorse feedback that you see as helpful. Identify peer-nominated exemplars to share and discuss. And debrief the whole class on the review results to identify revision priorities.

Faster than ever, you will help writers decide What should I do next?, let reviewers know Were my comments helpful?, and help motivate students to give better feedback in the next review.

Pedagogy: Formative Feedback and Writing Instruction Technology: Post-review Reports, Debriefing Reviews
endorsements Endorsing feedback can encourage writers and reviewers to improve.
Step 4

Guide and Plan Revision

Writers’ plans for revision reveal their thinking about the feedback they have received. Your revision tasks will prompt students to process and prioritize the feedback they’ve selected. Students’ reflective notes about revision strategies are another valuable source of feedback for you.

Revision plans are the best place for you to guide students' revision priorities. Comment on students’ plans to affirm writers’ choices or redirect them. This makes the time-intensive work of guiding students’ revision faster and helps to insure that your advice will have impact on students’ learning.

Pedagogy: Teaching Revision (instructors), Rethinking and Revising (students) Technology: Revision Tasks with Eli Review
revision plan screenshot Students can add and prioritize feedback on revision plans.
Step 5

Analyze and Iterate

Eli’s all-in-one-place reports of formative feedback ensure that writers have what they need to make criteria-driven revisions. This same information is valuable as evidence of learning.

See evidence of improvement in students’ drafts, in the feedback students give to others, in their revision plans, and in their revisions. Want to know how the whole group is doing? See how engaged students are in the writing process with Eli’s analytic reports. Adjust your teaching goals on the fly if students are doing well, or give a few writers a nudge to adjust their focus. What you can see, you can teach!

Pedagogy: Formative Feedback and Writing Instruction Technology: Course-level Analytics, Student-level Analytics, Data Downloads
analytics screenshot Review analytics help compare engagement over time.

What's Next?

Eli Review is a powerful and flexible tool that supports a diverse range of disciplines. For example, instructors are using Eli in 3rd grade ELA, 7th grade Spanish, 9th grade Social Studies, First-Year Composition, College Junior Computer Science, and M.A. level pharmacology.

Whether students are composing writing-to-learn responses or formal drafts, Eli Review helps students get more from peer learning.

Ready to fly? As a next step, you might:

Eli Review Free Trial

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New instructors can try Eli Review free for two weeks - plenty of time to see how
peer learning can lead to better feedback, better learning, and better writers.

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