abstract: Writing scientific explanations is increasingly important, and today's students must have the ability to navigate the writing process to create a persuasive scientific explanation. One aspect of the writing process is receiving feedback before submitting a final draft. This study examined whether middle school students benefit more in the writing process from receiving peer feedback or teacher feedback on rough drafts of scientific explanations. The study also looked at whether males and females reacted differently to the treatment groups. And it examined if content knowledge and the written scientific explanations were correlated. The study looked at 38 sixth and seventh-grade students throughout a 7-week earth science unit on earth systems. The unit had six lessons. One lesson introduced the students to writing scientific explanations, and the other five were inquiry-based content lessons. They wrote four scientific explanations throughout the unit of study and received feedback on all four rough drafts. The sixth-graders received teacher feedback on each explanation and the seventh-graders received peer-feedback after learning how to give constructive feedback. The students also took a multiple-choice pretest/posttest to evaluate content knowledge. The analyses showed that there was no significant difference between the group receiving peer feedback and the group receiving teacher feedback on the final drafts of the scientific explanations. There was, however, a significant effect of practice on the scores of the scientific explanations. Students wrote significantly better with each subsequent scientific explanation. There was no significant difference between males and females based on the treatment they received. There was a significant correlation between the gain in pretest to posttest scores and the scientific explanations and a significant correlation between the posttest scores and the scientific explanations. Content knowledge and written scientific explanations are related. Students who wrote scientific explanations had significant gains in content knowledge. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Curriculum and Instruction 2011

The study, using a within-group design with eighteen adult high-beginner Chinese L2 learners, investigated the effects of peer review and co-writing on writing in Chinese-as-a-foreign language. Three writing conditions (peer review, co-writing, and individual writing) and three narrative writing topics were counterbalanced for the collection of data, including forty-five writing products, seventy-two questionnaires, videorecorded screen activities and interactions. The research has three main aims: (a) to investigate the effects of peer review and co-writing on writing with respect to fluency, complexity, and accuracy, (b) to explore the nature of verbal interactions during peer review and co-writing, and (c) to investigate students’ perceptions of the three writing activities. With regard to writing performance, the research found no statistically significant differences in measures of fluency and complexity. However, peer review and co-writing resulted in significantly more accurate writing than individual writing, but no difference was observed in the two collaborative writing activities. The analysis of verbal interactions indicated that (1) there were significantly more on-task episodes in peer review than in co-writing; (2) there were significantly more language-related episodes (LREs) and content-related episodes in peer review than in co-writing, while there were significantly more idea-related episodes and text-assessing episodes in co-writing than in peer review; (3) students paid significantly more attention to LRE-lexis and LRE-grammar in peer review than in co-writing, and the differences were mainly observed in discussions on word meanings, verb forms, word usage, and sentence/phrase meanings; and (4) there were also significantly more spelling episodes in peer review than in co-writing. Concerning students’ perceptions, although students tended to prefer co-writing to peer review and peer review to individual writing, they held competing attitudes toward the three activities and believed each of the three had their own strengths, which could not be replaced by the advantages of the other. The findings suggest that peer review, co-writing, and individual writing play different roles in Chinese L2 learners’ development of writing skills, as measured by a range of linguistic indices and as revealed by students’ evaluations. Thus, they are all important because they direct learners to different aspects of their language development. / Graduate

Although peer review, in which students evaluate each others' papers, has been shown to be beneficial in many writing classrooms, the benefits of peer review to the reviewer, or the student giving the feedback, has not been thoroughly investigated in the field of second language (L2) writing. The purpose of this study is to determine which is more beneficial to improving student writing: receiving or giving peer feedback. The study was conducted at the English Language Center (ELC) at Brigham Young University (BYU). Ninety-one students in nine writing classes at two different proficiency levels, high beginning and high intermediate, participated in the study. The treatment groups reviewed anonymous papers, but received no peer feedback over the course of the semester, while the control groups received feedback, but did not review other students' papers. Writing samples collected at the beginning and end of the semester were used to evaluate which of the two methods most helped student writers. In addition, a short survey was conducted to investigate the correlation between student attitudes and demographic information and these results. Results of a series of t-tests indicated that the treatment groups, which focused solely on reviewing peers' writing, made more significant gains in their writing over the course of the semester than the control groups. These results were also more significant at the lower than the higher proficiency level. Students? level of comfort with the writing process and desire to learn how to use feedback were found to be significant predictors of these results.