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.
Applebee, A. N. (1981). A study of writing in the secondary school. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
2.
Artemeva, N., & Logie, S. (2002). Introducing engineering students to intellectual teamwork: The teaching and practice of peer feedback in the professional communication classroom. Language and Learning across the Disciplines, 6, 62-85.
3.
Atwater, L. A., Waldman, D., Atwater, D., & Cartier, P. (2000). An upward feedback field experiment: Supervisor’s cynicism, follow-up and commitment to subordinates. Personnel Psychology, 53, 275-297.
4.
Beason, L. (1993). Feedback and revision in writing across the curriculum classes. Research in the Teaching of English, 27, 395-421.
5.
Boud, D., Cohen, R., & Sampson, J. (1999). Peer learning and assessment. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 24(4), 413-427.
6.
Butler, R. (1987). Task-involving and ego-involving properties of evaluation: Effects of different feedback conditions on motivational perceptions, interest, and performance. Journal of Educational Psychology, 79(4), 474-481.
7.
Cho, K., & Schunn, C. D. (2003). Validity and reliability of peer assessments with a missing data estimation technique. Proceedings of ED-Media 2003, 1511-1514.
8.
Cho, K., & Schunn, C. D. (in press). Scaffolded writing and rewriting in the discipline. Computers & Education.
9.
Cho, K., & Schunn, C. (2005). The SWoRD system (Version 3.0) [Computer software]. Pittsburg, PA: Learning Research and Development, University of Pittsburgh. Available at http://ladybug.lrdc.pitt.edu/sword.
10.
Clare, L. C., Valdes, R., & Patthey-Chavez, G. G. (2000). Learning to write in urban elementary and middle schools: An investigation of teachers’ written feedback on student compositions. Center for the Study of Evaluation Technical Report, 526.
11.
Cohen, M., & Riel, M. (1989). The effect of distant audience on students’ writing. American Educational Research Journal, 26(2), 143-159.
12.
Cole, S., Coats, M., & Lentell, H. (1986). Towards good teaching by correspondence. Open Learning, 1(1), 16-22.
13.
Coupe, N. (1986). Evaluating teachers’ responses to children’s writing. (pp. 122-144). In J. Harris & J. Wilkinson (Eds.), Reading children’s writing: A linguistic view. London: Allen and Unwin.
14.
Dragga, S. (Ed.). (1992). The technical writing repertoire. Lubbock, TX: Association of Teachers of Technical Writing.
15.
Faigley, L. (1989). Judging writing, judging selves. College Composition and Communication, 40, 395-412.
16.
Fife, J. M., & O’Neill, P. (2001). Moving beyond the written comment: Narrowing the gap between response practice and research. College Composition and Communication, 53(2), 300-321.
17.
Freedman, S. W. (1987). Peer response groups in two ninth-grade classrooms (Tech. Rep. No. 12). Berkeley: University of California.
18.
Graner, M. H. (1985). Revision techniques: Peer editing and the revision workshop. Dissertation Abstracts International, 47, 109.
19.
Gee, T. (1972). Students’ responses to teachers’ comments. Research in the Teaching of English, 6, 212-221.
20.
Haswell, R. H. (2005). NCTE/CCCC’s recent war on scholarship. Written Communication, 22, 198-223.
21.
Hughes, I. E., & Large, B. J. (1993). Staff and peer-group assessment of oral communication skills. Studies in Higher Education, 18, 379-385.
22.
Johnstone, K. M., Ashbaugh, H., & Warfield, T. D. (2002). Effects of repeated practice and contextual-writing experience on college students’ writing skills. Journal of Educational Psychology, 94(2), 305-315.
23.
Leki, I. (1995). Good writing: I know it when I see it. In D. Belcher & G. Braine (Eds.), Academic writing in a second language: Essays on research and pedagogy (pp. 23-46). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
24.
Magin, D., & Helmore, P. (2001). Peer and teacher assessment of oral presentation skills: How reliable are they?Studies in Higher Education, 26, 287-298.
25.
Mittan, R. (1989). The peer response process: Harnessing students’ communicative power. In D. Johnson & D. Roen (Eds.), Richness in writing: Empowering ESL students (pp. 207-219). New York: Longman.
26.
Mowl, G., & Pain, R. (1995). Using self and peer assessment to improve students’ essay writing—A case-study from geography. Innovations in Education and Training International, 32, 324-335.
27.
Neuwirth, C. M., Chandook, R., Charney, D., Wojahn, P., & Kim, L. (1994). Distributed collaborative writing: A comparison of spoken and written modalities for reviewing and revising documents. Proceedings of the Computer-Human Interaction ‘94 Conference, April 24-28, 1994, Boston Massachusetts (pp. 51-57). New York: Association for Computing Machinery.
28.
Richer, D. L. (1992). The effects of two feedback systems on first year college students’ writing proficiency. Dissertation Abstracts International, 53, 2722-2722.
29.
Rucker, M. L., & Thompson, S. (2003). Assessing student learning outcomes: An investigation of the relationship among feedback measures. College Student Journal, 37, 400-404.
30.
Seidman, E. (1968). Marking students’ compositions: Implications of achievement motivation theory. Dissertation Abstracts International, 28, 2605-A.
31.
Shrauger, J. S., & Schoenemann, T. J. (1979). Symbolic interactionist view of self-concept: Through the looking glass darkly. Psychological Bulletin, 86, 3-3, 549-573.
32.
Smith, S. (2003). The role of technical expertise in engineering and writing teachers’ evaluations of students’ writing. Written Communication, 20, 37-80.
33.
Smith, S. (1997). The genre of the end comment: Conventions in teacher responses to student writing. College Composition and Communication, 48, 249-268.
34.
Smyth, K. (2004). The benefits of students learning about critical evaluation rather than being summatively judged. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 29(3), 370-378.
35.
Sommers, N. I. (1980). Revision strategies of student writers and experienced writers. College Composition and Communication, 31, 378-387.
36.
Sproull, L., & Kiesler, S. (1986). Reducing social context cues: Electronic mail in organization communication. Management Science, 32, 1492-1512.
37.
Stevens, A. E. (1973). The effects of positive and negative evaluation on the written composition of low performing high school students. Dissertation Abstracts International, 34, 1778-A.
38.
Straub, R. (1997). Students’ reactions to teacher comments: An exploratory study. Research in the Teaching of English, 31, 91-119.
39.
Sue-Chan, C., & Latham, G. P. (2004). The relative effectiveness of external, peer, and self-coaches. Applied Psychology: An international Review, 53(2), 260-278.
40.
Taylor, W., & Hoedt, K. (1966). The effect of praise upon the quality and quantity of creative writing. Journal of Educational Research, 60, 80-83.
41.
Topping, K. (1998). Peer assessment between students in colleges and universities. Review of Educational Research, 68(3), 249-276.
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
