Critical Reflection

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

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 them. However these feedback given is often not targeted. Feedback given by students are mostly superficial and rarely targets the fundamental problems of an essay, but instead targets the minor details of spelling and grammatical errors.

Accuracy of the feedback given by peers is also another issue. The feedback by peers can sometimes be inaccurate. Although majority of the feedback given is valid, not everything reflected is feedback is true. Knowing this means that students now have to carefully discern if the feedback given is legitimate, and in what context. In some cases the peer may merely be suggesting an alternate form of writing style, when there were no mistakes to begin with.

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.

However, it is extremely difficult for students to create this feedback. Firstly, the students giving feedback have no formal training. Although students 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, asking them to give feedback on similarly skilled writers would reap a mediocre result at best.

Tutor feedback is very useful in addressing the problems of the essays, as well as giving good pointers. However there are limitations on the amount of tutor feedback given, since each essay takes very long to read and each teacher has many students.