The writing skills are essential for learning process of university students, regardless of the kind of studies which they are studying (Tÿnajala, Mason & Lonka, 2001). However, they do not take advantage of it; university students have difficulties to write and using this skill as a tool for learning (Carlino, 2004; Sabaj, 2009). Flower (1979) showed that university students organize their ideas as they appear, without establish an order to try to communicate something (like journalists or professionals writers). Some teachers have created and applied many programs to improve writing skills at university (Carlino, 2004; Cassany, López & Martí, 2000). Nevertheless, these programs are related to write difficult texts (like scientific text) which are unknown by university students (Bazerman, Keranen & Encinas, 2012).

Moreover, some teachers applied peer review techniques to improve students university writing, but the results are contradictories (Topping, 2010). On one hand, some authors consider that peer review allows improving the quality of the texts and learning new knowledge about the essay topic (Venables & Summit, 2003). On the other hand, other researchers establish that this idea is not entirely true, because we have to take into account some relevant aspects in a peer review experience: the feedback quality (Liang, 2010) and the linguistic knowledge of the reviewers (Hui-Tzu, 2006). In addition, when university students review a text, they only pay attention into superficial aspects (Wallace & Hayes, 1991). Some of them review words and phrases, but not the text as a whole (Sommers, 1982). Therefore, they need tools to give a good feedback or to guide their writing.

Tools to improve writing and guide peer review

There are some tools to improve self-confidence, self-regulation and reduce anxiety of students when they have to write, like rubrics (Panadero & Jonsson, 2013).  This tool has academicals effects when is used like a way to help revision processes in writing tasks (Montanero, Lucero y Fernández, 2014; Yan et al., 2012). There are others tools to guide writing processes (Liang, 2010): rating scales (structure around a group of criteria with numeric or qualitative values, without levels) and script (a tool with information to plan and write a text). The last one, could be a prompt (a list of words), a checklist (a list with closed questions), scripts (it has open questions) and diagrams (also has visual elements). Ribeiro (2015) investigated in her thesis the effectiveness of scripts, rubrics and blank sheets in a collaborative writing task in Primary Education. The results demonstrated that students, who used a script to plan the writing of a text and a rubric to give a peer feedback, wrote better texts than students who were assessed using other kind of tools.

Objectives

In this context, we do not know what the result is if we mix at university two aspects: 1) peer review and 2) tools for guide the assessment; so, we wonder: What practices would be good to improve the university students' skills when they write? What tools would be useful in a peer review task at university? Could university students give a good feedback using a rubric or a rating scale in a peer review-writing task? The present research try to answer these questions. We have a general purpose: Compare the effects of different tools that guide the peer review in a writing task at University.

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