Students’ online argumentative peer feedback, essay writing, and content learning: does gender matter?

Abstract

Whilst the importance of online peer feedback and writing argumentative essays for students in higher education is unquestionable, there is a need for further research into whether and the extent to which female and male students differ with regard to their argumentative feedback, essay writing, and content learning in online settings. The current study used a pre-test, post-test design to explore the extent to which female and male students differ regarding their argumentative feedback quality, essay writing and content learning in an online environment. Participants were 201 BSc biotechnology students who wrote an argumentative essay, engaged in argumentative peer feedback with learning partners in the form of triads and finally revised their original argumentative essay. The findings revealed differences between females and males in terms of the quality of their argumentative feedback. Female students provided higherquality argumentative feedback than male students. Although all students improved their argumentative essay quality and also knowledge content from pre-test to post-test, these improvements were not significantly different between females and males. Explanations for these findings and recommendations are provided.

Teachers’ online teaching expectations and experiences during the Covid19-pandemic in the Netherlands

“…Based on these reviews, a few questions were rephrased and elaborated on. The ranking questions used a Likert five-point scale in accordance with comparable studies in this field of research (Noroozi et al 2018;Van Ginkel et al 2020).…”

Worked example or scripting? Fostering students’ online argumentative peer feedback, essay writing and learning

“…Third, literature suggests that features and terminologies of argumentative essays could be different from domain to domain (Andrews, 1995;Wingate, 2012). This may cause students struggle in writing similar essays for different argumentation tasks in other domains and topics (see Noroozi, Hatami, et al, 2018;Wingate, 2012). These problems suggest that students need supplementary support for how to write high quality argumentative essays.…”

“…Huisman et al, 2018), domain-specific learning (e.g. Latifi et al, 2019;Noroozi, Hatami, et al, 2018;Valero Haro et al, 2019), motivation (e.g. Hsia et al, 2016), self-efficacy (e.g.…”

Higher Education Students’ Perceived Readiness for Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning

“…CSCL environments can promote students' content understanding and domain-specific knowledge acquisition [6][7][8][9][10][11], contribute to students' motivation [12,13], foster development of higher-order thinking skills and metacognitive skills [14], and enhance the development of prosocial behavior, such as showing empathy and helping others [15].…”