Prohibiting or Promoting Learning: An Exploration of Peer Feedback in Collaborative Academic Writing

Past literature on peer feedback has identified a number of learning benefits to students (higher confidence, greater autonomy, better understanding, etc.), yet few have explored whether and how peer feedback prohibits learning. To close this gap, this study recorded 12 students' classroom feedback sessions over seven weeks when they collaboratively wrote a book review. The text-talk analysis revealed three feedback patterns: empathy, compromise and disapproval. The subsequent interview showed that while the students gained higher sensitivity to review writing, they complained about the excessive cognitive load of the activity and even doubted peer feedback usefulness. Based on those findings, the paper suggested a revised design on peer feedback sessions in academic courses.