When setting up a peer review assignment, select Create New Review Task List to build a custom task list. You'll start with a ready-made set of instructions and prompts you can keep, edit, or swap out in order to fit your assignment’s needs. This article explains the design behind them.
When peer review falls flat
Without proper guidance on a peer review, students tend to default to the same three patterns: vague praise ("great job!"), surface corrections (grammar, spelling), and judgment without explanation ("this paragraph doesn't make sense"). None of these help a writer revise.
Packback's Task List short answer prompts are designed to interrupt those patterns. Each prompt asks for something specific (a moment, a location, a suggestion) so that students produce feedback a writer can actually use.
As a bonus, research on peer review consistently shows that the person giving the feedback often learns as much as the person receiving it. Reviewing forces close reading and analytical thinking. The prompts are designed with that in mind, too.
Packback’s student instructions
Before students see the short answer prompts, they see a short set of instructions. They read:
Reviewing someone else's work is one of the better ways to improve your own. It forces you to think carefully about what writing does and how it does it, which is exactly the kind of thinking that makes you a stronger writer.
Before you dive in, read the piece all the way through once. As you go, you can highlight moments in the submission and leave comments directly on the text. Then come back to these prompts. Your job is to tell the author what it was actually like to read their work. Specific observations, even small ones, are more useful than general impressions.
The first paragraph reframes peer review as a skill-building activity for the reviewer, not just a service to the writer. The second gives them some direction on where to start with each peer review: read the submission all the way through, comment directly on the writing when appropriate, and be as specific as possible while completing tasks.
Packback’s five short answer prompts
Prompt 1
Where did you feel most engaged while reading? What specifically did the author do at that moment that pulled you in?
This is the lowest-stakes prompt in the set, and it's first for a reason. Asking reviewers to report their reading experience rather than render judgment lowers the social pressure of the task. Requiring them to name what the author did (not just what they felt) pushes them from reaction to analysis, which is where the learning happens.
Prompt 2
Find one place where the author's direction or intention isn't as clear as it could be. Highlight that moment in the submission and drop a comment on it. Then use the space below to explain what you noticed and suggest one specific change that would help.
This targets coherence, the connective tissue between ideas. The three-part structure (highlight and comment, explain, suggest) is deliberate: research on peer feedback shows that locating the problem, explaining it, and offering a suggestion are the three features that most reliably lead writers to actually revise.
Framing the prompt as a quality judgment ("isn't as clear as it could be") rather than a personal experience ("I got confused") matters: even a reviewer who followed everything perfectly can still identify room for more clarity. This prevents confident students from skipping the prompt.
Prompt 3
Pick a moment where you wanted more and didn't get it. This could be more detail, more explanation, more evidence, or more development. Why did you need more there, and what specifically would help?
This targets development, the most common weakness in student writing across assignment types. The list of options (detail, explanation, evidence, development) is intentionally genre-flexible, so the prompt works whether your students are writing argumentative essays, research proposals, or reflections.
The "why did you need more there" clause is the key move: it pushes reviewers past flagging an absence to articulating the reader's unmet expectation, which is far more useful to a writer trying to revise.
Prompt 4
What is the single strongest moment in this piece? Be specific about why it works and what the author did to make it land.
Explaining why something works is harder than identifying a problem, and more valuable for the reviewer's development as a writer. This prompt builds the analytical vocabulary that transfers to a student's own writing. It also produces genuinely useful indicators for the writer: knowing specifically what worked, and why, is as actionable as knowing what to fix.
Prompt 5
If the author could make one change before submitting, what would have the biggest impact on a reader? What is it, and what specifically should they do?
This is the synthesis prompt. It asks reviewers to weigh everything they've noticed across the review and identify the single highest-priority change. This forces them to prioritize rather than list. Constraining to one change also benefits the writer: a long list of notes can be paralyzing; one clear priority creates conditions for action.
The forward-looking framing ("biggest impact on a reader") is intentional. Asking what would help rather than what is wrong shifts the tone from evaluation to coaching, and produces more specific, constructive responses.
Customizing the task list
Packback's Task List is a starting point, not a requirement. You can edit any prompt, remove prompts that don't fit your assignment type, or reorder them as needed when setting up your peer review task list.
Learn more about setting up your review task list in Setting Up a Peer Review Assignment.
Still Have Questions?
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