(White paper by Bill Hart-Davidson about my study and use of Eli Review to enhance the peer review process. This is an example of how I use research to improve my teaching)
Kathleen Rose sets an ambitious goal for her first year writing students at Iowa State University each semester. She not only wants to see them become better writers, she also wants to see them become a community of learners who help one another improve. A teacher-researcher and Ph.D. student, Kathleen has seen that, with Eli her “students can become a community of students working together in effective interpersonal ways to help each other achieve success.”
Rose has, along with colleagues Susan Pagnac, Eric York, & Erin Zimmerman, been using Eli for the past two years and studying the impact that it can have on student learning. The group has reported its findings at the annual Conference on College Composition and Communication Convention in 2013 and 2014 to large crowds. The focus of the group’s various research projects ranges from how students respond to different commenting styles to how student attitudes and confidence about their technology literacy influence their writing and reviewing habits.
At the 2014 CCCC meeting in Indianapolis, Rose’s presentation on students working with Eli in her face-to-face writing classroom at Iowa State drew a lot of interest from teachers and writing program administrators in the audience. What made the attendees take notice was the quality of evidence Rose was able to bring to bear on questions that have long been debated by writing teachers: can we use peer response sessions to encourage students to become something like a community?
As the semester progressed, Rose noticed that students’ review comments became more detailed, something she attributes to “the ability I had in Eli to project representative comments on the screen as students generated them, and maybe by the students’ clear preference for the anonymity Eli offered.”
Rose also noticed characteristics among her students that language theorist John Swales associates with discourse communities as well. She noticed, for instance, that students were using a shared, specialized language for talking about writing and revision. Students also began to value and develop social conventions for getting beyond simple polite responses in order to give one another direct, and sometimes tough, feedback. One of the most exciting results Rose found is that students were “interpreting my prompts for each other and telling each other what they thought I would be looking for.”
Evaluating the results of her study and considering the broader project consisting of more than 200 students in her colleagues’ classes at Iowa State, Rose argued that one of the most significant challenges to getting students to buy into peer learning is scaffolding a successful peer review experience. If feedback does not come from a place of shared goals and agreed upon interpersonal conventions, or if students do not trust the feedback they receive, they do not value or gain much from the activity. But having a sense of community can be beneficial too, according to Rose, who reported that some of her students indicated they were more willing to take tough feedback when they felt they were “part of a respectful and productive community”.
With Eli, Rose was able to carefully oversee the peer review process and provide the scaffolding necessary to help students practice and gain confidence, and even help one another become better reviewers and better writers. Along the way, a random group of students perhaps became a little more like a community.