Abstract
Prior research on peer assessment often overlooks how much students learn from providing feedback to peers. By practicing revision skills, students might strengthen their ability to detect, diagnose, and solve writing problems. However, both reviewer ability and the quality of the peers’ texts affect the amount of practice available to learners. Therefore, the goal of the current study is to provide a first step towards a theoretical understanding about why students learn from peer assessment, and more specifically from providing feedback to peers. Students from a large Introduction to Psychological Science course were assigned four peers’ papers to review. The reviewing ability of each student was determined, and to whom the students provided feedback was manipulated. The features and focus of the comments from a sample of 186 participants were coded, and the amount of each type was analyzed. Overall, reviewer ability and text quality did not affect the amount of feedback provided. Instead, the content of the feedback was affected by reviewer ability. Low reviewers provided more praise than high reviewers, whereas high reviewers provided more criticism than low reviewers. This criticism from high reviewers described more problems and offered more solutions, and it focused more often on high prose and substance. In the only significant reviewer ability × text quality interaction, high reviewers described more problems in the low-quality texts than in the high-quality texts, whereas low reviewers did not make this distinction. These results suggest that high reviewers and low reviewers may utilize different commenting styles, which could significantly impact the benefits of peer assessment.
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Notes
The SAT (Scholastic Assessment Test) is a standardized test used for college admissions in the United States. It consists of three sections: the verbal section tests critical reading skills, the writing section tests problem detection skills and grammar and usage knowledge, and the mathematics section tests arithmetic operation, algebra, geometry, statistics, and probability knowledge.
Universities in the U.S. typically require a first year composition course, and the university in the present study requires two semesters of composition.
The turnitin.com peer review functions primarily focused on generating end comments rather than marginalia. Reviewers were able to tag specific locations in the text that could be used in the end comment to indicate where a particular problem existed; however, this function was not obvious and most students did not use it. In addition, the specific commenting prompts were separate from the ratings prompts, which could allow one to create a reviewing assignment that utilized more fine-grained evaluation dimensions and broader commenting dimensions. Finally, the reviews were anonymous—that is, a pseudonym was used to identify both the writer and the reviewer.
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Patchan, M.M., Schunn, C.D. Understanding the benefits of providing peer feedback: how students respond to peers’ texts of varying quality. Instr Sci 43, 591–614 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-015-9353-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-015-9353-x