Peer Comments Research Articles

Interpreting quality as evaluated by peer students

ABSTRACTThis paper examines how interpreting quality is evaluated by peer students in an English-Chinese simultaneous interpreting class. In the study, 18 students received training on how to evaluate interpreting based on three quality components: accuracy, presentation and target language quality. Then, they were asked to evaluate three translation samples by their peers and to provide comments based on the three components. After examining the collected peer comments, this paper found that there were quantitative and qualitative differences across the three components. Quantitatively speaking, peer students tended to give more comments on grammar in TL quality and fluency in presentation. Qualitatively speaking, peer students tended to give more in-depth evaluation to substitution in accuracy. The research suggests that while some easy-to-spot quality components like TL grammar may receive more peer comments, other components like substitution may stimulate peer evaluators’ reflective thinking and thus should be stressed in the teaching of interpreting.

Using Peer Review with Greek EFL College Students

Peer review fosters student critical thinking and self-evaluation (Wood and Kurzel 2008). Numerous studies show that peer review is effective in improving student writing (Althauser and Darnall 2001, Bean 2011), and that it benefits the students receiving as well as those giving the feedback (van den Berg, Admiraal and Pilot 2006). However, these issues have not been greatly researched in Greece. Greek culture bestows great authority to the teacher and students are not accustomed to peer feedback. I have embarked on a small-scale, exploratory, classroom-based study conducted at Deree - The American College of Greece where English is the medium of instruction. Data include first and revised drafts of three academic writing assignments, written peer comments, and learner reflections on the peer reviewing experience. To further explore student attitudes toward peer review, I also administered an online questionnaire. Initial quantitative and qualitative analyses reveal (a) in general student reviewers and reviewees alike accept peer review as an appropriate pedagogical activity; (b) students revise their writing taking into account peer feedback and (c) as reviewers, students were not more critical in giving feedback when doing peer review anonymously. Preliminary results are interpreted with an understanding of the limitations of the ongoing study.

A Corpus-Based Study of Peer Comments and Self-Reflections

Engaging students in peer reviewing in the writing classroom has been widely practiced as a way of assessment for learning. In-depth research is needed however to investigate how students specifically use peer comments in their editing process. Using a corpus-based approach, this article investigates the acquisition of journalistic writing skills by 112 undergraduates in Hong Kong. The learner corpora comprise student comments and self-reflections from an online news writing project. While grammatical accuracy remains to be a concern for effectiveness of the peer review practice, the findings reflect sound understanding of structure, layout and style of the online news genre among the participants. Although the students commented more on contents and organization of news writing, findings from keyword search and co-text in the concordances demonstrate awareness of main features of the online news genre. The findings further clarified judgement and choices made by the ESL learners during the drafting and editing processes. The study suggests how peer assessment and self-assessment can be effectively practiced through a cycle of reviewing peer writing, receiving peer comments and self-reflecting on their own drafts. It also indicates how peer review may help acquisition of style and lexico-grammar which can be demanding for many ESL learners.

Writer-Reviewer Anonymity in EFL Peer Review

The present study investigated the impact of writer-reviewer anonymity in the context of an academic writing course. Data collected for analysis in this study included data from two questionnaires, students' compositions and peer review comments. Embracing a quasi-experimental design, 34 undergraduate EFL students were matched in two homogeneous groups (i.e. anonymous and identified). Each group contained reciprocal dyads (matched with a similar ability peer), and provided either anonymous or identified peer feedback on each other’s compositions. The study aimed to examine a) the change, if any, in EFL students’ perceptions of peer feedback practice due to anonymity, b) the impact of anonymity, if any, on the amount of written work and the number of peer comments produced, c) the focus of peer comments between anonymous and identified dyads and d) the extent to which anonymity, or lack of it, would encourage/discourage reviewers’ criticality in their general evaluative comments and how writers’ responded to such evaluative comments. Major results indicated that anonymity positively affects length of written text, time spent in reviewing, number of comments in most language areas and a tendency towards criticality on the side of the reviewers.

The alignment of written peer feedback with draft problems and its impact on revision in peer assessment

Despite the wide use of peer assessment, questions about the helpfulness of peer feedback are frequently raised. In particular, it is unknown whether, how and to what extent peer feedback can help solve problems in initial texts in complex writing tasks. We investigated this research gap by focusing on the case of writing literature reviews in an academic writing course. The dataset includes two drafts from 21 students, sampled to represent a wide range of document qualities, and 84 anonymous peer reviews, involving 1,289 idea units. Our study revealed that: (1) at both substance and high prose levels, drafts of all quality levels demonstrated more common problems on advanced writing issues (e.g. counter-argument); (2) peer feedback was driven by difficulty of the problem rather than overall draft quality, peer comments were not well aligned with the relative frequency of problems, more comments were given to less difficult problems; (3) peer feedback had a moderate impact on revision, and importantly, receiving multiple comments on the same issue led to more repairs and improvement of draft quality, but consistent with the comments received, authors tended to fix basic problems more often. Implications for practice and research are drawn from these findings.

Peer Assessment in Facebook Comment Column about One Topic in Writing II Subject of the Fourth Semester Students of Sriwijaya University English Study Program

The objectives of this study were to find out (1) the completeness of the students’ comments on Facebook, (2) the quality of the students’ comments, and (3) the percentage of how well the students identified the characters of a good paragraph. The population of this study was the fourth-semester Palembang class students of English Education Study Program 2013 of Sriwijaya University. The sample of the study was 48 students that were selected by using total sampling technique. The data were collected from the students’ comments on Facebook of Writing II class in the academic year 2015 and analyzed by using two rubrics containing scoring systems. The results showed that the completeness in giving comments on the Facebook group could be categorized into a very good category with the final score was 10. While, the quality of the comment from the students was also Good with the final score was 15.56. The percentage of how well the students identified the characters of a good paragraph was 83.33% in very good level, 10.41 % in good level and 6.25 % in average level. Overall, the final score of the students’ comments from those three research questions were average with the score was 9.85. It can be concluded that the students’ comments on Facebook Comment Column in Writing II Class in the academic year 2015 was average.
 Keywords: academic writing; Facebook; peer comments

Analysis of Peer Comments in English Writing Classes

Peer feedback is often used in today’s College classroom. But is it effective or not? Will students accept their peer’s comments since they might on the same level? This study analyzed 72 Chinese English major sophomores’ first drafts, peer feedback, and their revised draft. It discovers that 92.9% comments were revision-oriented and 80.9% of the revision-oriented comments were adopted in the students’ revisions, which proved that peer feedback is an effective method to be used in routine English writing class.

An Action Research on Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) Peer Feedback in EFL Writing Context

While a number of previous studies have examined the effects and benefits of computer-mediated communication (CMC) peer feedback, little research has taken an action research approach to track the process of EFL students’ learning in CMC peer feedback. In this article, we describe an action research project conducted with 26 second-year students majoring in business English at a Chinese university. This project aims to enhance EFL students’ engagement with peer feedback activities and to help them improve their writing through CMC peer feedback. The analysis of multiple sources of data including questionnaires, interviews, blog-based peer comments, student writing assignments, classroom observations, and teacher reflections illustrates how blog-based CMC peer feedback can be a pedagogical and collaborative learning activity in EFL writing classrooms and how peer feedback training can enhance students’ engagement with peer feedback tasks. Implications for implementing CMC peer feedback in EFL writing contexts are provided in the paper.

The impact of YouTube peer feedback on attitudes toward recovery from non-suicidal self-injury: An experimental pilot study.

BackgroundNon-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) is a serious public health concern facing adolescents and young adults worldwide. Despite growing concern that accessing NSSI content on the internet may negatively influence perceptions toward NSSI recovery, no studies have examined actual impacts.ObjectivesThis experimental pilot study assessed the impact of exposure to hopeless versus hopeful peer messages on perceptions toward NSSI recovery. It was hypothesized that exposure to hopeless messages would lead to more negative perceptions about NSSI recovery whereas the opposite would occur for hopeful messages.MethodsWe developed fictional peer comments embedded in a screenshot of an NSSI-themed YouTube video and randomly assigned participants to either hopeless or hopeful recovery-oriented comments. Participants’ attitudes toward NSSI recovery, recovery-oriented subjective norms, and recovery self-efficacy were measured pre- and post-exposure using an online questionnaire.ResultsSixty-one participants with a self-reported NSSI history (mean age 20.89 years) completed the online survey. There was a statistically significant effect for attitudes toward recovery. Within the hopeful comment condition, there was an increase in positive attitudes toward recovery and in recovery-oriented subjective norms. Participants exposed to hopeless peer messages did not report an increase in hopeless attitudes toward NSSI recovery.ConclusionsOur pilot study indicated that exposure to hopeful online messages improved positive attitudes toward recovery and recovery-oriented subjective norms, while exposure to hopeless messages did not increase hopeless attitudes. Future research on the impacts of online peer comments on one’s attitude toward NSSI recovery and support-seeking behavior could further inform practices and policies.

Do question prompts support students in working with peer feedback?

To benefit from peer feedback, students must engage in mindful cognitive processing of peer comments. In this study, 70 university students prepared an initial version of their term paper, revised their text based on peer feedback, and then submitted a final version of their term paper. In the experimental condition, students were supported in working with peer feedback by question prompts. Question prompts were not provided in the control condition. Students in the experimental condition reported a higher level of consideration of the received feedback, and they integrated more correct comments and less incorrect ones. However, question prompts did not result in a greater performance increase from the initial version to the final version of the term paper.

A Temporal Study of the Effects of Online Opinions: Information Sources Matter

This study examines when and why online comments from different sources and platforms influence a movie’s box office receipts over time. Premised on the theory of information search, we hypothesize that consumers are more likely to engage in active search in the early stages of a movie’s release due to greater choice uncertainty, and passive attention is more likely to kick in for later stages of a movie’s release, as uncertainty decreases. To test the proposed hypotheses, we tracked over 1,500 sources of online expert and consumer reviews for cinematic movies released for an entire year and continuously monitored major social media sites (e.g., Twitter) for comments. We text-mined the comments to elucidate the sentiments and analyzed the data. Confirming our hypotheses, the results showed that expert reviews and pull-based peer comments have a significant influence in early stages of a movie’s release, and the effects decrease over time. In contrast, the volume of comments from push-based microblog platforms have a significant influence on later box office receipts. Our research demonstrates that online opinions are not always persuasive and useful, and our findings provide insights into when consumers are likely to pay attention to which types of online opinions.

A CASE STUDY OF COMBINED PEER-TEACHER FEEDBACK ON PARAGRAPH WRITING AT A UNIVERSITY IN THAILAND

Writing in English is challenging for ESL writers, so feedback is crucial in assisting them. Although several studies have been conducted on the effectiveness of peer and teacher-feedback in ESL writing, studies on the combined peer-teacher feedback model tend to be scarce. This study thus reported on the combined feedback model in two paragraph-writing classes of sixty students at a university in Thailand where English is taught as a foreign language, students are reported to be passive in class activities and most writing programs are still taught using the traditional method. Students’ peer comments (both valid and invalid ones), their revisions based on both their peers’ and teacher’s feedback (correct and incorrect revisions) and their grades on each paragraph were recorded, and a five-point Likert scale survey and a focus group interview were conducted. The findings indicated its success in terms of students’ positive attitudes towards this feedback model, the usefulness of peer comments, high percentages of feedback incorporations and the high overall writing scores. This paper is thus expected to shed some light on how Thai university students with their passive style of learning English positively react to this interactive activity and partly reflect how in-service teachers adjust feedback strategies in their actual teaching situations.

Anonymous versus identified peer assessment via a Facebook-based learning application: Effects on quality of peer feedback, perceived learning, perceived fairness, and attitude toward the system

This study investigated online peer assessment within a Facebook-based learning application, with a focus on the effects of anonymity. First, it examined anonymity's effects on the distributions of affective, cognitive, and meta-cognitive peer feedback. Second, it looked at the effects of anonymity on learners' perceived learning, their perceptions of whether peer assessment was fair, and their attitudes toward the system. The study's two-group experimental design randomly assigned 32 pre-service teachers either to an identifiable condition (with the assessors' full real names attached), or an anonymous condition; and both groups were asked to provide written comments on five assessees' microteaching performance based on videos of their teaching. The results indicated that the anonymous group provided significantly more cognitive feedback (i.e., vague suggestions, the “extension” type of explicit suggestions for improvement), whereas the identifiable group offered more affective feedback (i.e., supporting, opposing) and more metacogntive feedback (i.e., reflective comments). The anonymous group also perceived that they had learned more from peer assessment and had more positive attitudes toward the system, but they also perceived peer comments as being less fair than the identifiable group did. The findings provide important evidence for the cognitive and pedagogical benefits of anonymity in online peer assessment among pre-service teachers.

Charting the routes to revision: An interplay of writing goals, peer comments, and self-reflections from peer reviews

Building upon self-regulated learning theories, we examined the nature of student writing goals and the relationship of these writing goals to revision alone and in combination with two other important sources of students’ self-regulated revision—peer comments on their writing, and reflections for their own writing obtained from reviewing others’ writing. Data were obtained from a large introductory undergraduate class in the context of two 1000-word writing assignments involving online peer review and a required revision. We began with an investigation of students’ free response learning goals and a follow-up quantitative survey about the nature and structure of these writing goals. We found that: (a) students tended to create high-level substantive goals more often, (b) students change their writing goals across papers even for a very similar assignment, and (c) their writing goals divide into three dimensions: general writing goals, genre writing goals, and assignment goals. We then closely coded and analyzed the relative levels of association of revision changes with writing goals, peer comments, reflections from peer review, and combinations of these sources. Findings suggest that high-level revisions are commonly associated with writing goals, are especially likely to occur for combinations of the three sources, and peer comments alone appeared to make the largest contributions to revision.

Semi-Automated 8 Collaborative Online Training Module for Improving Communication Skills

This paper presents a description and evaluation of the ROC Speak system, a platform that allows ubiquitous access to communication skills training. ROC Speak (available at rocspeak.com) enables anyone to go to a website, record a video, and receive feedback on smile intensity, body movement, volume modulation, filler word usage, unique word usage, word cloud of the spoken words, in addition to overall assessment and subjective comments by peers. Peer comments are automatically ranked and sorted for usefulness and sentiment (i.e., positive vs. negative). We evaluated the system with a diverse group of 56 online participants for a 10-day period. Participants submitted responses to career oriented prompts every other day. The participants were randomly split into two groups: 1) treatment - full feedback from the ROC Speak system; 2) control – written feedback from online peers. When judged by peers (p < .001) and independent raters (p < .05), participants from the treatment group demonstrated statistically significant improvement in overall speaking skills rating while the control group did not. Furthermore, in terms of speaking attributes, treatment group showed an improvement in friendliness (p < .001), vocal variety (p < .05) and articulation (p < .01).

Iterative Design and Classroom Evaluation of Automated Formative Feedback for Improving Peer Feedback Localization

A peer-review system that automatically evaluates and provides formative feedback on free-text feedback comments of students was iteratively designed and evaluated in college and high-school classrooms. Classroom assignments required students to write paper drafts and submit them to a peer-review system. When student peers later submitted feedback comments on the papers to the system, Natural Language Processing was used to automatically evaluate peer feedback quality with respect to localization (i.e., pinpointing the source of the comment in the paper being reviewed). These evaluations in turn triggered immediate formative feedback by the system, which was designed to increase peer feedback localization whenever a feedback submission was predicted to have a ratio of localized comments less than a threshold. System feedback was dynamically generated based on the results of localization prediction. Reviewers could choose to either revise their feedback comments to address the system’s feedback or could ignore the feedback. Our analysis of data from system logs demonstrates that our peer feedback localization prediction model triggered the formative feedback with high precision, particularly when peer feedback comments were written by college students. Our findings also show that although students often incorrectly disagree with the system’s feedback, when they do revise their peer feedback comments, the system feedback was successful in increasing peer feedback localization (although the sample size was low). Finally, while most peer comments were revised immediately after the system feedback, the desired revision behavior also occurred further after such system feedback.

Developing a culture of commenting in a first-year seminar

In the context of diversifying college enrollment and rapidly evolving technologies this study explored how an interactive blogging community developed within a first-year seminar for low-income students (N = 66) at a four-year public urban college. In collaboration with administrators and faculty, the researcher integrated a blogging activity into the first-year seminar. Four times during their first six months of college, students posted narratives reflecting on their transition experiences and were also encouraged to read and comment on peers' blog posts. The current study examined why some posts received more peer comments than others and how these trends changed over time. Using narrative analysis, the researcher measured the rates of specific evaluative devices in students’ posts. Multiple linear regression was then used to determine that psychological state evaluative devices per post predicted a small amount of the commenting variance at the beginning of the study. By the end of the study intensifying and psychological state evaluative devices per post predicted over 50% of the commenting variance. These findings illustrate how over time first-year students used the interactive writing platform to make sense of their college transition and develop a culture of commenting.

Adolescents’ internalizing symptoms as predictors of the content of their Facebook communication and responses received from peers.

This research examined how adolescents' internalizing symptoms, such as depression, anxiety, and loneliness, relate to the content of their Facebook communication and the responses they receive from peers on Facebook. Participants (n = 125, 56 female, age 18) reported on their internalizing symptoms in the summer following 12th grade, and downloaded an application to their Facebook account that stored the content of all of their Facebook communication to secure, online archive. Two months of participants' status updates and comments and peers' comments were coded for content. Relations between internalizing symptoms and Facebook communication differed for girls and boys. For girls, internalizing symptoms predicted several types of Facebook content: negative affect, somatic complaints and eliciting support. In contrast, internalizing symptoms were not related to boys' Facebook posts. Relations between internalizing symptoms and peers' responses on Facebook also differed by gender. For girls, internalizing symptoms positively predicted receiving more peer comments expressing negative affect, and peer responses offering support. For boys, internalizing symptoms did not predict any of the measured peer responses. These findings suggest that girls prone to internalizing symptoms use Facebook in ways that appear similar to co-rumination, by expressing problems to friends and receive possibly reinforcing feedback in return.

Verbal Venting in the Social Web: Effects of Anonymity and Group Norms on Aggressive Language Use in Online Comments

Scholars often blame the occurrence of aggressive behavior in online discussions on the anonymity of the Internet; however, even on today’s less anonymous platforms, such as social networking sites, users write plenty of aggressive comments, which can elicit a whole wave of negative remarks. Drawing on the social identity and deindividuation effects (SIDE) model, this research conducts a laboratory experiment with a 2 (anonymity vs. no anonymity) × 2 (aggressive norm vs. non-aggressive norm) between-subjects design in order to disentangle the effects of anonymity, social group norms, and their interactions on aggressive language use in online comments. Results reveal that participants used more aggressive expressions in their comments when peer comments on a blog included aggressive wording (i.e., the social group norm was aggressive). Anonymity had no direct effect; however, we found a tendency that users’ conformity to an aggressive social norm of commenting is stronger in an anonymous environment.

Using blogs for facilitating and connecting nurse educator candidates

BackgroundSocial media includes blog applications, which can be used as online journals or diaries that encourages interaction and collaboration within an online community. The aim of this study was to explore and describe the use of blog writing as learning journals during a short course for nurse educator candidates about social media. MethodA qualitative descriptive design was used. The participants were nurses, Bachelor, Master's and Doctoral students who intended to follow a career in education (N=24, female n=21, male n=3, Mean age 37) from four different countries of the European Union. The blogs written during the course were used as a data collection method and the data was analyzed with qualitative content analysis. ResultsA total of 260 blogger posts and 372 peer comments were analyzed. Four main categories emerged from the analysis: 1) Course content, new knowledge, and changed views, 2) Reflection and critical thinking, 3) Encouraging and peer support and 4) Expressing feelings, experiences, and expectations. ConclusionBlogs are potential learning spaces in short courses in nurse educator education, especially in sharing feelings and experiences, enhancing an encouraging atmosphere, critical thinking, and reflection.