Abstract:
Increased demand for a first year, skills-based, academic genre-focused writing course at a New Zealand university has paralleled increased need for practice and feedback among the more diverse student body, which appears less familiar with the requirements of academic writing. However, department budget constraints and student-tutor ratios limit capacity to provide this increased practice and feedback. Peer review is already employed, but as research has found, requires training to be effective. This paper describes an attempt to provide such training online without significantly increasing tutor workload. Aropä, a peer assessment server based at the university, was modified to include revision practice tasks based on student produced texts. These revision tasks were completed after related lectures and before other writing tasks and assignment peer review, to increase awareness of stronger and weaker writing and to enhance revision skills. Peer reviews completed before and after the introduction of the revision practice tasks are compared and student survey data is analysed to determine the effect of this training stage.