SQR 2

Mario A. Garcia
Eng. 1301
Trang Phan
9/7/2010
SQR 2: Peer Response: Teaching Specific Revision Suggestions
SUMMARY: This article immediately reminded me about my junior year in high school. While getting prepared for our TAKS test we would practice by writing short answer questions and writing essays about certain topics. There was only one way that we were going to get better at doing this and the only way was to be critiqued by our fellow students. This article talks about how helpful another student’s response can be to someone, when they provide the correct feedback and don’t hold back with what you really want to hear. There are many techniques that can be used to make something better. There is PQP, which stands for praise, question and polish. With PQP you can gather group members and read aloud while others follow along. The oral reading can help you individually, because you can find changes that you will want to make while you are reading along. Student’s responses fall into three categories; Vague, General, but Useful, and Specific. The highest percentage for these categories was given to, General, but Useful, because the idea to help is there but it is not fully captured by the person to whom it is being said. There is a system to help improve a peer response and it involves total class activities, small-group activities, individual work, and follow ups that help improve what you are trying to get across to someone else. When this system is being performed it makes it easier for, the person being told what to improve on, to make their changes because they are more understandable. Statistically speaking when this is done the percentages of the categories general, but useful and specific were the highest while vague responses decreased dramatically.
QUESTION: What are the three levels of categorization which student’s response’s fall into? How can the statistics that conform to each level be improved for the highest level, and decreased for the lowest?
RESPONSE: There are three levels of categorization for student’s responses are vague, general, but useful, and specific. Vague comments are “full of generalities, providing little or no specific direction for revision or transfer through praise.” General, but useful comments are “still too general but provide some direction for revision.” Specific comments “provide the writer specific direction for revision.” From these three levels, vague comments are the least useful and specific comments are the most useful responses when a student is going to critique a paper. This may be so but the level that is used most in students is general, but useful. It is statistically proven, in a consensus, that fifty three percent of comments were general, but useful. Even though this may be a high statistic for comments that can give some help to others, it would be better to have a higher percentage than twenty eight for specific comments. In order to increase the percentages for specific comments there were many activities that can take place to make the comments more useful to those who are getting them. There are total class activities in which the class decides which comment is more useful from four options that have been given to them. Small group activities are performed after a class activity. Groups are made of three or four people and they “explain why each response was ‘effective’ or ‘not effective’ in the light of generalizations derived from the [total] class activity.” Students then work individually to make “three ineffective responses from the group activity sheet and to compose a specific response that would make each comment useful to the writer.” When another consensus was made three weeks later with the same students the statistics dropped from nineteen percent to fourteen percent for vague, from fifty three percent to forty four percent for general, but useful, and rose from twenty eight percent to forty two percent for specific. Therefore if you want to increase your way of commenting on others people’s papers in order to help people out as much as possible.