Peer review is a family of instructional techniques. Historically, these have been employed in writing and many other educational domains. Modern computer technologies facilitate the use of peer review, which is especially relevant to educational settings where it is not practical to administer peer review manually. The use of computer support for peer review has shed light on many important scientific questions, some of which we summarize. These findings set the context for the papers in this special issue, which demonstrate how computer support for peer review enables research on peer review itself and on its pedagogical significance.

How do comments on student writing from peers compare to those from subject-matter experts? This study examined the types of comments that reviewers produce as well as their perceived helpfulness. Comments on classmates’ papers were collected from two undergraduate and one graduate-level psychology course. The undergraduate papers in one of the courses were also commented on by an independent psychology instructor experienced in providing feedback to students on similar writing tasks. The comments produced by students at both levels were shorter than the instructor’s. The instructor’s comments were predominantly directive and rarely summative. The undergraduate peers’ comments were more mixed in type; directive and praise comments were the most frequent. Consistently, undergraduate peers found directive and praise comments helpful. The helpfulness of the directive comments was also endorsed by a writing expert.