Brammer and Rees are concerned with the treatment of students’ perspective regarding the peer edition process. They begin by examining what elements of peer review are pedagogically essential to the writing process. What they determined was that peer review must focus on five basic questions:
1. Does the frequency of peer review relate to perceived value of peer review for students and writing faculty?
2. Does the perceived value of peer review relate to the use of required and/or optiorial peer review?
3. Does student self-confidence in peer review relate to perceived value of peer review?
4. Does student self-confidence in peer review relate to perceived instruction in peer review?
5. Does perceived value of peer review relate to instruction in peer review, for both students and writing faculty?
Brammer and Rees took this information and applied it to a study in a Southeastern university. The study found results that; wait for it…wait for it; they found results that proved what they were hoping to find, wow! I know that this is an overly cynical view, but any attempt to quantify something as abstract as confidence is hilarious, just look at the consumer confidence studies that circulate on the news; according them, no feels confident enough to invest, but the stock market still exists.
Ranting tangent aside, the pair’s experiment initially found that the students felt that peer review was “NOT very helpful;” however, when the authors looked over their data again, they found that by combining the average within each section, they found that students felt peer edition was “SOMEWHAT helpful.” The authors go on to say that students who are exposed to more peer editing activities become more comfortable and confident with the process. Again, the devil is in the details; of coarse the students are more comfortable and confident; training in anything will produce these results. The telling statement is that students did not claim that they enjoyed peer editing or found it to significantly improve their writing. At best, one in two students expressed “positive” responses to peer editing when questioned.
The authors close with a theory that if instructors believed in peer editing, the students would follow. I think this is a logical statement, but believing something is useful and the thing being useful are two different things. Once again, I hate to be the naysayer, but I have to agree with those crotchety sounding teachers from the beginning of the piece; peer editing can be useful, but only in limited situations, and even in these, the results will largely benefit the students who were fair to good writers to begin with.
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I agree and disagree. I think that the need for this particular study was probably pretty slim. I probably could have come up with the same results based on my own limited observations. The authors set us up for some big revolution, but then basically told us what any teacher of English could have told us.
ReplyDeleteI think that there can be some validity to their conclusion though. I think that by incorporating peer review into all steps of the writing process, it gives it more possibilities to aid student writers.