Critical Reflection Draft

Write a critically reflective post on the topic “The Role of Peer and Tutor Feedback." Explain your view of that feedback, how it impacted your developing writing skills, and  whether/how you might have transferred content, organization and language skills learned in the course to writing assignments within any other module. This should be 300 to 400 words.

Background: like an intro of your life.

Starting from our first online assignment, peer and tutor feedback has been an integral part of the ES1102 learning journey

Peer feed back

+usefulness

Peer feedback is valuable in helping correct many of the surface mistakes being made, as well as giving alternative viewpoints and insights to the students writing which might have been missed by him.

                -receiving
Useful, however the feedback is often not targeted. Feedback is mostly superficial and rarely targets the fundamental problems of an essay, but rather just the minor details of spelling and grammatical errors.

Accuracy of the feedback. The feedback is coming from a peer, and sometimes, this feedback is inaccurate. Although majority of the feedback is valid, not everything which is feedback is true. Knowing this means that students now have to carefully discern if the feedback given is legitimate, and what is the context. Is the content in question out right wrong, or is the peer merely suggesting an alternate form of writing style, when there are no mistakes to begin with.

                -giving

+ A positive thing about feedback is that it forces a student to improve through giving feedback. As a student is giving feedback, he has to take into consideration about what is being required in his peers writing, and thus learning it for himself in the process.

Extremely difficult to give feedback.

Firstly, we are untrained. Although we are given a “crash course” with pointers on what to do, almost as much time is spent understanding what is required within the rubrics than actually reading and giving feedback on the essay.

Secondly to give feedback, one needs to be able to tell what is wrong. Many students have different styles of writing and rarely know a different way of writing apart from their own, thus when reading another person’s essay it is not clear where the mistakes are, since students themselves would have phrased the same content in another way. When a student is unsure of even their own writing, which should be the general reality since they have to attend a course like ES1102, asking them to give feedback on similarly skilled writers would reap a mediocre result at best.

Tutor feedback

                -receiving (frequency of feedback)
Very useful, however there are limitations on the amount of tutor feedback given, since each essay takes very long to read and the teacher has many students.