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Conclusions
My findings validate the benefits offered by both tutor and peer review. While such forms of collaborative review utilize students “at the boundaries between communities” (Bruffee 1) and differ in theoretical underpinnings, goals, and methods (Harris), they ultimately both offer productive advice for writers who have conceived at least one draft of an upcoming assignment. Indeed, both Writing Fellows and members of the Rose Writing Studio often commented on higher-order concerns. Hence, despite the different theoretical underpinnings and agenda-setting processes of the two forms of review, both the asymmetrical relationship and scaffolded agenda-setting process fomented by Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development theory (Bodrova and Leong) and the balanced, peer-led environment fostered by collaborative learning theory (Bruffee, “Collaborative Learning”) produce relevant concerns about a student-writer’s draft. However, the effectiveness of collaborative review tends to increase based on the reviewer’s access to writing center pedagogy. This is emphasized by the finding that Writing Fellows’ comments were more effective in terms of higher-order focus and specificity in two out of the three drafts analyzed. Writing Fellows, who engage in a one-semester course in tutoring writing across the curriculum, tended to comment on higher-order concerns and engage with specific elements of the writer’s draft more frequently than Rose Writing Studio members, who only received three weeks of tutor training before reviewing their peers’ drafts.
The difference in comment effectiveness was especially brought to light in the Writing Fellows and Rose members’ diverging approaches to lower-order concerns and directivity. The finding that members of the Rose Writing Studio were more apt to comment on lower-order concerns, often in a very direct manner, and overall utilize fewer questions corroborates Gere and Abbott’s discovery that peers tend to be more directive when commenting on drafts. It also suggests that peer tutors tend to view comments as a conversation with the writer, while students often consider comments as a means to correct what is incorrect in a peer’s draft, thus fulfilling their supposed role as convention informants.
Even so, on one of the drafts, the Rose member received a higher comment effectiveness score than her Writing Fellow counterpart, underscoring that the productivity of peer review depends not only on the education level of the reviewer but also on the draft being reviewed and the reviewer’s specific response to that draft. While Harris distinguishes the two forms of review based on tutors’ goals and methods, she fails to account for the nuance involved in any interaction between two people, whether tutor and student or peer and peer. In contrast, by producing a concrete comparison between peer and tutor reviews, my study offers a new perspective on the idea that any collaborative experience is a highly individualized interaction.
Future Orientations
Future scholarship should pay special attention to differentiating between specificity and directivity. In addition, subsequent research can expand the prevalence of these findings by analyzing comments made in classroom peer review, as compared to the peer review in the Rose Writing Studio. The Rose Writing Studio is unique in that it offers its students a community of writers dedicated to peer review and engaged in discussions about writing processes and linguistic justice. In a classroom, the community aspect and discussions are quite different, so critical analysis of comments made in classroom peer review as compared to those made by Writing Fellows would generate a more widely applicable comparison that adds nuance to the writing center community’s understanding of the validity of peer review. Such research remains relevant, as Harvey Kail reminds faculty that collaboration in the writing center “is here to stay” (594).