“You Can’t Just Write an Essay in an Hour”: Supporting Middle Schoolers’ Peer Feedback and Revision Process through Online Writing Groups

This paper explores a middle school American history teacher’s effort to support revision through peer feedback in his classroom. The teacher wanted to develop disciplinary writing skills among his students and teach them how to offer each other quality and meaningful feedback. He established online writing groups to support in-class instruction. Students uploaded essays to Google Classroom and shared them with their writing group. They used the comments and reply features to dialog about their work. The study found that teaching students to offer "clarifying" and "suggesting" feedback improved the quality of their comments to peers, using online writing groups motivated most students to revise, and students began to value peer feedback and the revision process overall.