Publication Date
2020
Keywords
peer response, peer review, peer editing
Abstract
This article reports on a large-scale study of peer and instructor response and student reflection on response. The corpus of instructor and peer response to 864 drafts of student writing was collected via ePortfolios from first-year writing courses and courses across disciplines at 70 U.S. institutions of higher education. The following questions guided a qualitative analysis of the data: (a) What are the similarities and differences in the ways instructors and peers respond to college writing? (b) What perspectives do college students have on the feedback they receive on their writing from instructors and peers? Three themes emerged from a review of the literature on peer and instructor response and the results of the analysis of the data: (a) peer responders tend to be more focused on global concerns than instructors, (b) peer responders tend to be less directive than instructors, and (c) students learn as much from reading their peers’ drafts as they do from the comments they receive from peer responders or the instructor. The findings support an argument for placing peer response at the center of the response construct, rather than thinking of peer response as merely a complement to instructor response.
Recommended Citation
Melzer, Dan
(2020)
"Placing Peer Response at the Center of the Response Construct,"
Journal of Response to Writing: Vol. 6:
Iss.
2, Article 2.
Available at:
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/journalrw/vol6/iss2/2