How peer grading could help students develop their professional writing skills
Peer grading is a process where students seek and give feedback to one another based on set assessment criteria. Online training platforms have been lately experimenting with this feature to increase interaction and engagement, and build a classroom-type structure for online learners.
Those who wish to become a better writer and want to make a career in fiction writing, non-fiction writing, editing, screenplay and advertising, or publishing, can extract significant insights from their peers’ feedback. Peer grading has numerous advantages that help in the development of students’ writing skills. Some of these include – Diverse and timely feedback
Instructors are usually occupied with multiple batches of students, thus, delivering detailed and timely feedback on every assignment becomes time consuming. With one instructor handling humongous tasks, students might get delayed and receive inaccurate feedback, get lesser time to rectify their mistakes, and experience a lack of diverse feedback.
Peer grading feature allows students to anonymously share unbiased and detailed feedback on each other’s assignments which saves time and broadens their perspective. They get inspiration from others’ writing styles and get a better understanding of their own work. Timely and diverse feedback provides more room for practising, allows students to improve in every other assignment, reduces the odds of overestimating or underestimating their own skills, and encourages them to read and write more. Writing for a broader audience
Peer grading helps students practice to write professionally for a larger audience, and not just for the sake of completing assignments. Students take assignments seriously and work with utter dedication to ensure they perform the best.
They learn to keep their audience in mind, choose a niche and find writing ideas accordingly, observe and research with a broader perspective, and avoid hitting on sensitive or offensive content. Response from peers also improves their writing style, choice of words, sentence framing, brevity in content, and allows them to be expressive.
Students also learn to structure their content according to the genre, type of audience, their age group, demographics, and forms such as fiction, feature, news, advertisement, or non-fiction. Learn to detect, rectify, and avoid mistakes
Peer grading develops a sense of reflective comparison where students compare their own writing style, words, structure, and mistakes with that of their peers and work dedicatedly towards improving themselves. In the process of giving feedback and detecting others’ errors, students unknowingly find and remember their own unique and repetitive mistakes and ensure to avoid them in future.
Common mistakes such as wrong or no insertion of punctuation marks, usage of a wrong word, spelling mistakes, capitalisation, faulty sentence structure, misplaced apostrophe, lengthy sentences, or missing articles can only be detected and avoided with continuous writing practice.
Well-structured write-ups with fewer mistakes highlight students’ focus, dedication, and professionalism towards writing and helps them find better career opportunities in the future. Development of critical thinking and cooperation skills
Inclusion of the peer grading feature in online training increases students’ interest and sincerity in assignments and projects. They spend more time critically analysing, […]
