The study investigated the impact of a reciprocal peer editing strategy on students' knowledge about writing and revising, their actual revising activity, and the quality of their writing. Students learned to work in pairs to help each other improve their compositions. The strategy was taught by special education teachers who were using a process approach to writing instruction in their classrooms and word processing to support the writing process. Students in the strategy group made more revisions and produced papers of higher quality when revising with peer support than students in a process approach control group. When revising alone, the strategy students made more revisions than controls, but did not produce papers of higher quality. On a metacognitive interview, strategy students demonstrated greater awareness of substantive criteria for evaluating writing in response to general questions about writing, but not in response to questions about evaluating and revising particular papers.
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