An Empirical Study On The Effectiveness Of Peer Review In English Writing MOOCs

The sweeping MOOCs have changed the traditional way of knowledge transmission and teaching evaluation.Under massive open online teaching circumstances,a major challenge for instructors is to review thousands or even tens of thousands of students who are involved in the course.To tackle this problem,the major online learning platforms such as Coursera,Udacity,and FutureLearn have introduced peer review to evaluate learners' homework.However,the reliability of peer review has been widely criticized,and the number of empirical studies on MOOCs' peer review has been negligible so far.Theoretical rationales for peer review include process writing theory,collaborative learning theory,and Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development as well as interaction hypothesis.This study aims to investigate the adoption rate of peer review and its effects on learners in “English Writing I” taught by Duke University.An undergraduate and two graduate students participate in 10-week course study.Research data consists of the first and final drafts of two projects,peer comments to first drafts and learners' reflection reports from Coursera platform,as well as questionnaires and individual interviews after the course.By comparing the peer review with the revisions through content analysis,the source of the changes is identified,the adoption rate of peer feedback is calculated and the reason for the rejection of comments is analyzed.The main findings of the study are as follows: 1)The average length of peer review is 242 words,and the number of word counts in final essays has increased by 169 words on average;2)the adoption rate of peer review is 60%;51% of learner revisions are directly influenced by peer comments;3)73% of the peer review is non-revision-oriented,among which 61% focuses in global area;and 27% is revision-oriented with major concrete modifications in local and miscellaneous areas;4)The uptake of peer feedback varies across individuals and topics,which is impacted by a number of factors such as the quality of commentsfrom peers,the quality of learner writings,the attitude of learners towards peer review,learners' learning background,flexible time schedule and technical environment.Questionnaires and interviews report that learners recognize the value of peer review for its usefulness and helpfulness.It is confirmed that peer feedback can raise writers' awareness of readers,increase learners' writing enthusiasm,improve their writing skills especially on content and structure,and enhance their critical thinking ability.