Maarten van de Ven
Using peer feedback is one way for teachers to provide their students with feedback on their writing products. Many teachers in Higher Education use peer feedback to evaluate the essays of their students. However, there does not yet appear to be consensus on how a teacher optimally organizes peer review processes. Luckily for them, research on peer feedback in education is expanding the last two decades.
One aspect of organizing peer feedback a teachers deals with is the way to pair students, for example based on their writing skills. Research into the way to match peers for peer reviewing processes, for example on ability, is scarce. A recently published study focuses on the way to match university students during peer feedback on academic writing assignments. These students were matched in terms of their scores on a preceding essay assignment into heterogeneous or homogenous dyads. The pairs of students were asked to provide anonymous, formative feedback on each other’s draft essays.
The study shows that neither individual ability nor the composition of the pair in terms of heterogeneity or homogeneity, relates directly to writing performance. The same goes for the quality of the feedback. Students of varying ability levels benefited to a similar extend from peer feedback. It did not matter whether the peer feedback focused on content-related, structure-related or stylistic aspects of the draft essays. This might be good news for teachers that use peer feedback in their courses.