Assessing peer and instructor response to writing: A corpus analysis from an expert survey

Over the past 30 years, considerable scholarship has critically examined the nature of instructor response on written assignments in the context of higher education (see Straub, 2006). However, as Haswell (2008) has noted, less is currently known about the nature of peer response, especially as it compares with instructor response. In this study, we critically examine some of the properties of instructor and peer response to student writing. Using the results of an expert survey that provided a lexically-based index of high-quality response, we evaluate a corpus of nearly 50,000 peer responses produced at a four-year public university. Combined with the results of this survey, a large-scale automated content analysis shows first that instructors have adopted some of the field's lexical estimation of high-quality response, and second that student peer response reflects the early acquisition of this lexical estimation, although at further remove from their instructors. The results suggest promising directions for the parallel improvement of both instructor and peer response.