Peer feedback on college students’ writing: exploring the relation between students’ ability match, feedback quality and essay performance

Abstract

There does not appear to be consensus on how to optimally match students during the peer feedback process: with same-ability peers (homogeneously) or different-ability peers (heterogeneously). In fact, there appears to be no empirical evidence that either homogeneous or heterogeneous student matching has any direct effect on writing performance. The current study addressed this issue in the context of an academic writing task. Adopting a quasi-experimental design, 94 undergraduate students were matched in 47 homogeneous or heterogeneous reciprocal dyads, and provided anonymous, formative peer feedback on each other's draft essays. The relations between students' individual ability or dyad composition, feedback quality and writing performance were investigated. Neither individual ability nor dyad composition directly related to writing performance. Also, feedback quality did not depend on students' individual ability or dyad composition, although trends in the data suggest that highability reviewers provided more content-related feedback. Finally, peer feedback quality was not related to writing performance, and authors of varying ability levels benefited to a similar extent from peer feedback on different aspects of the text. The results are discussed in relation to their implications for the instructional design of academic writing assignments that incorporate peer feedback. ARTICLE HISTORY

Online peer feedback on video presentations: type of feedback and improvement of presentation skills

“…Our results expand on results found by Huisman et al (2017Huisman et al ( , 2018 who found that the nature of received peer feedback was not related to students' writing improvement and that students' peer feedback perceptions were not related to an increase in writing performance. The current study applied the same coding scheme to identify the nature of peer feedback and used the same questionnaire for feedback perceptions, but in the context of a presentation assignment.…”

“…Following earlier research (van den Berg, Admiraal, and Pilot, 2006;Huisman et al 2017) on peer feedback comments, the comments and annotations were coded using feedback functions (analysis, evaluation, revisions, and possible elaborations on the final two) and feedback aspects (in this case the four main categories of the rubric: content, speech, presence and audio-visual tools). Each fragment was coded using a matrix of the functions and aspects, and the number of comments in each category was counted and used for analysis.…”

Peer feedback on academic writing: undergraduate students’ peer feedback role, peer feedback perceptions and essay performance

“…Coding procedure. Following the two-step procedure used by Huisman et al (2017), feedback segments were first coded as an aspect of content, structure or style, after which each aspect-coded segment was assigned one or more feedback functions. Hence, a feedback segment was attributed only one feedback aspect, which could include multiple functions.…”

Understanding the Difference Between Self-Feedback and Peer Feedback: A Comparative Study of Their Effects on Undergraduate Students' Writing Improvement

“…Function-related feedback types refer to the role that feedback serves concerning the text. This type of feedback has been categorized into analysis, evaluation, explanation, and revision (Van den Berg et al, 2006 ; Van der Pol et al, 2008 ; Huisman et al, 2017 , 2018 ). Others have classified feedback as cognitive or affective; they have identified cognitive feedback categories of summarization, specificity, explanation, and scope and affective feedback categories of praise and mitigation language (Nelson and Schunn, 2009 ; Patchan and Schunn, 2015 ; Patchan et al, 2016 ).…”

“…Second, each type has been found to have a significant influence on writing. Summary and praise have been found to be positively associated with feedback implementation (Bienstock et al, 2007 ; Nelson and Schunn, 2009 ); problems and solutions have been found to have inconsistent results regarding their relationships with writing across different studies (Tsui and Ng, 2000 ; Tseng and Tsai, 2007 ; Bitchener, 2012 ; Huisman et al, 2017 ). These inconsistent results may be attributed to students' varying writing proficiencies.…”