Effects of Trained Peer vs. Teacher Feedback on EFL Students' Writing Performance, Self-Efficacy, and Internalization of Motivation

Explicating peer feedback quality and its impact on feedback implementation in EFL writing

Introduction

Although it is commonly acknowledged that peer feedback quality is crucial to the success of peer review, there is a lack of consensus on how it could be determined. More importantly, how feedback quality interacts with other factors like feedback features and focus, and ultimately influences peer feedback implementation remains insufficiently investigated.

Methods

The present study examined peer feedback quality and its impact on Chinese students' feedback implementation in two argumentative writing tasks. Peer feedback quality was measured according to a self-designed two-dimensional measurement scale: accuracy and revision potential.

Results

Quantitative analyses of 5,606 implementable idea units of feedback and 440 writing drafts by 110 students revealed that feedback accuracy was at a medium level and revision potential was at a low level, with accuracy demonstrating stronger predictive power on implementation; the predictive strengths of feedback accuracy and revision potential were strongest when feedback features and focus were considered; the overall peer feedback quality was low and medium-quality feedback was implemented most frequently; feedback quality significantly and most strongly predicted implementation in combination with feedback features and focus.

Discussion

The study highlights the importance of future instructions in training students to provide and implement high-quality feedback with good accuracy and high revision potential.

The role and features of peer assessment feedback in college English writing

Peer assessment is a common pedagogical practice for evaluating students' writing in college English classrooms. However, in-depth research on the learning outcomes after peer assessment is scarce and inconsistent; how peer feedback is used has not been fully explored either. This study compared peer feedback to teacher feedback and explored the different features of feedback and its impact on draft revision. Two specific research questions were answered in this study: (1) In which aspects can peer feedback supplement teacher feedback in improving the linguistic features in writing? (2) What are the differences in features of peer feedback versus teacher feedback? And how do they connect to feedback take-in? Two writing tasks were assigned to 94 students. One received teacher feedback and the other peer feedback. Pre-feedback and post-feedback writings in both tasks (4 sets in total) were scored and human ratings were adjusted using Many-Facet Rasch modeling to control for differences in leniency. Drawing on three natural language processing (NLP) tools, this study also assessed writing qualities by comparing 22 selected indices related to the scoring rubrics for human raters, which involve three dimensions: cohesion, lexical quality and syntactic complexity. Peer and teacher feedback was then coded based on features of feedback to explore their influence on draft revision. The results showed that both peer and teacher feedback had positive effects on rating scores. We confirmed peer feedback as an effective classroom approach to improve writing, though limited compared to teacher feedback as reflected in the indices. In terms of feedback features, students often stopped at identifying the language problems, while the teacher provided more explanations, solutions or suggestions regarding the problems identified. Implications for peer feedback research and implementation of peer assessment activities are provided.