Peer review: turning barriers into learning opportunities for IFP students

by Catriona Johnson

Introduction
For IFP students, the advantages of participating regularly in peer review are widely acknowledged. Developing learners’ ability to give and receive feedback has far-reaching benefits beyond their foundation year as it enables them to evaluate and improve their own work more effectively, develop their own internal perception of ‘quality’, and build confidence with the skill of reviewing, useful for their future academic and professional lives. However, encouraging students to engage actively in the process is not always straightforward, as there are a number of barriers which can inhibit participation. I decided to investigate these challenges through an action research project with my Academic Writing class this year to explore how to improve engagement. Many of the barriers that came up in my research, including cultural, linguistic and affective factors, relate to the four features of Carless and Boud’s (2018) framework for student feedback literacy (Fig 1). Their framework suggests that if students develop their ability to appreciate feedback, make judgements and manage affect, they should then become more competent at taking action in terms of applying feedback to future work, thereby closing the feedback literacy loop (Boud & Molloy, 2013). I am going to use this framework to show how all four features can be developed during the IFP course by turning student barriers to participation into positive learning opportunities that will improve their engagement with peer review as well as their overall feedback literacy.

Appreciating feedback processes: Providing opportunities for meta-dialogues
Students are often dismissive of peer feedback and are more likely to incorporate teacher feedback into their writing, as they consider the teachers the more experienced and trustworthy experts (Tsui and Ng, 2000; Yang et al., 2006). Data from my interviews confirmed that some IFP students value tutor feedback more highly than peer feedback, describing it as more credible and useful. However, here lies the first learning opportunity: building in time in class to share and unpack students’ preconceived ideas and culturally-bound reservations about peer review early in the course, through class discussions and individual tutorials. This will not only help to explore the often unknown or underappreciated benefits of peer review but could also help to improve class dynamics by encouraging students to discuss personal concerns more openly. Banister (2020) highlights the importance of these regular meta-dialogues, which can increase students’ understanding of peer feedback practices as well as building empathy in the classroom.

Making judgements: Developing linguistic competence
Engaging in peer review develops students’ ability to make evaluative judgements through comparison of their own work with that of their peers or exemplars (Carless and Boud, 2018). However, IFP students often lack the linguistic resources to provide and interpret feedback, so that even if they can identify strengths and weaknesses in the samples, they struggle to articulate their evaluation. Indeed, one of my students commented that his English “is not so good, so I can’t express what I want or understand what others say.” This gap in linguistic competence provides the perfect opportunity to focus on functional language during peer review workshops, which students could use for a range of other collaborative tasks. For example, materials could include a bank of phrases for praising, sensitively critiquing or asking for clarification, which would increase students’ confidence with reviewing, as well as enable more meaningful dialogues post feedback. Integrating these linguistic frames into the materials will encourage learners to take a more active role in the process (Banister, 2020).

Managing affect: Encouraging reflection on experiences
Resistance to peer review is also related to socio-emotional factors, as students may lack confidence with the social interaction necessary for this kind of collaborative task and may struggle to manage difficult emotions evoked by giving and receiving feedback. Negative affect, such as shame about sharing work, anxiety about upsetting classmates, or defensiveness about receiving feedback, can all prevent active participation. Several of the IFP students mentioned the challenge of engaging in peer review in the first teaching block (TB1) before an atmosphere of trust had been established. One commented that in TB1 “you just don’t want to do something wrong basically or criticize something wrongly because you don’t have that confidence between each other” while another observed that in TB2 it was easier to review each other’s work “since we were closer to each other, so we were more open to discuss the ideas between us and to get new ideas that come out from those discussions.” Although this atmosphere of trust will often develop naturally over time, aided by the tutor, giving students time to reflect on any negative affective reactions to peer review early in the course may also help them to overcome these socio-emotional barriers. For example, Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle (1988) could be used to allow students to explore their experience of participating in a peer review workshop, or as Hoo, Deneen and Boud (2021) suggest, reflective journals structured around Kolb’s Experiential Learning Cycle (1984) could help to focus students’ attention on key critical incidents related to peer review.

Taking action: Building in time for discussion and goal setting
As mentioned above, students need to learn how to take action by applying tutor and peer feedback to their work. This part of the process is sometimes overlooked in peer review workshops, as students may leave the class without setting goals for their next draft. By building in time for post feedback discussion, in which students can help each other to make sense of the comments and complete an action plan for their next piece of writing, they will begin to understand the transferable nature of peer feedback to their future work. These discussions will also provide opportunities to develop other key skills, for example, one student pointed out that an added benefit of peer review is the chance “to improve our speaking skills and communication skills”, while another student observed that “when we discuss the feedback, we can also improve our own language use.”

Conclusion
The next phase of this action research project will focus on implementing interventions and evaluating their effectiveness. These interventions will include providing more opportunities for meta-dialogues about the value of peer feedback, integrating more functional language into workshops, encouraging students to reflect on feelings related to peer review, and building in more time for discussion and goal setting post feedback. With sufficient scaffolding, in terms of tutor guidance and curriculum design, students will hopefully become more confident and critical reviewers of each other’s work by the end of the course. This should also improve their overall feedback literacy and support their development as self-regulated learners, so that they can assess their own progress more autonomously at undergraduate level.

References
Banister, C. (2020) Exploring peer feedback processes and peer feedback meta-dialogues with learners of academic and business English. Language Teaching Research, p.1-19.

Boud, D. & Molloy, E. (2013) Rethinking models of feedback for learning: the challenge of design, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 38:6, 698-712.

Carless, D. & Boud, D. (2018) The development of student feedback literacy: enabling uptake of feedback, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 43:8, 1315-1325.

Hoo, H-T., Deneen, C. & Boud, D. (2021) Developing student feedback literacy through self and peer assessment interventions, Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 47:3, 444-457.

Tsui, ABM & Ng, M. (2000) Do secondary L2 writers benefit from peer comments? Journal of Second Language Writing 9:2, 147–70.

Yang, M., Badger, R. & Yu, Z. (2006) A comparative study of peer and teacher feedback in a Chinese EFL writing class. Journal of Second Language Writing 15:3, 179–200.