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Introduction
Stephen Kwame Dadugblor writes that “the concept of collaboration in writing center work is as old as the inception of writing centers” (75). Yet collaboration in the writing center is far from a monolith. For example, tutorials and peer response groups are both student-centered approaches that utilize collaboration as a robust tool for learning, encouraging dialogue between reader and writer to improve writers and their writing. However, tutorials and peer response groups differ in their theoretical underpinnings, goals, and methods, and these two forms of collaboration must not be conflated.
At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the distinction between tutor and peer collaboration is further blurred by undergraduate programs such as the Writing Fellows Program and the Rose Writing Studio, both of which engage undergraduate students in discussions with other undergraduate students about ways to improve previously penned essays. Participants in these programs exist in a nebulous space between uninformed students assigned to peer review and proseminar-trained graduate writing center instructors. Members of the Writing Fellows Program and Rose Writing Studio alike grapple with some information regarding tutoring best practices—a semester of instruction for Writing Fellows and a mere few weeks for members of the Rose Writing Studio—yet neither group is completely immersed in the world of writing center studies and best practices. Nonetheless, both groups are expected to comment on other undergraduate students’ work, thus offering ideal populations to explore questions regarding comment effectiveness from tutors with varying levels of education and experience. In light of such differences, I am prompted to ask: Does feedback vary from undergraduate tutor-to-peer review versus peer-to-peer review, and if so, how does such variation impact the effectiveness of collaborative learning to write?
I hypothesize that, though both programs are premised on the value of undergraduate peer review, in general, the comments offered by Rose students will be less effective—operationalized in terms of higher-order focus and level of specificity—than those offered by Writing Fellows. This difference likely stems from the fact that members of the Rose Writing Studio learn less about writing center pedagogy in the three weeks before they begin commenting on drafts and assume a reciprocal relationship with their peers, in which each student both shares their work and critiques that of others. In contrast, Writing Fellows encounter knowledge of tutoring best practices for a semester in English 403, a required seminar for new Fellows in tutoring writing across the curriculum, and develop a more nuanced ability to guide tutoring sessions. My findings corroborate this hypothesis but also offer evidence that the comments elicited by both kinds of review offer thoughtful ideas on improving a student’s draft.