In the ES1102 course, students were assigned many essays to write, draft after draft. After each draft, essays were subject to peer review and feedback during lessons. After receiving the peer review and feedback, students were encouraged to edit their essay, accordingly with the peer review and feedback. In general, I feel that it is a good method to encourage learning from our mistakes.
Occasionally, we are unable to notice our own mistakes in our essays, and require another person’s view and feedback to pick out the mistakes, and on how to improve on it. Say for example, expression errors. By receiving feedback from our peers it gives us more ideas on how to write an essay.Also, by giving peer review and feedback to my classmates has its learning points too. By referring to other essays, good and bad points can be picked out. From there, students can learn what to, and what not to do/follow for their future essays. It makes the students more aware of mistakes in our writings.
The feedback sessions also gives students a chance to interact with one another during the course, which is a good thing.
However, the peer review and feedback sessions are not without its own shortcomings. It is only efficient if the students actively participate in the session, to give consistent and constructive feedback. Otherwise, the feedback would not constructive, and does not add value to the student receiving the feedback. In the end, both the student giving and receiving the feedback do not benefit from this. It would also be a waste of time as the students do not see their errors, and continue committing the same errors in their writings. In the future, with higher level writings, then the impact will be felt.
Also after peer reviews, i have learnt the importance of having clearly organized essays. By having an organized essay, it conveys the idea clearly to the reader, and most importantly makes it easier to read and understand the piece of writing. some other takeaways from the peer reviews is to not commit redundant grammatical errors, such as run-on sentences and verb/tense agreements, just to name a few. With this, i would take more notice on such issues in my future writings outside of ES1102.
In conclusion, the peer review sessions have been useful in helping students to improve their writing skills. I hope the peer reviews has helped students achieve their goals set earlier in the semester.
cheeehoues1102 