A Study Of Senior High School Students’ Learning Engagement In Peer Feedback

Peer feedback,as a formative assessment method,is widely used in high school English writing class because of its role in promoting students’ writing skills.Exploring students’ engagement in feedback provides a new perspective on peer feedback research and is expected to help students better benefit from peer feedback.However,fewer studies have started from the complete three-dimensional model of learning engagement and closely combined learning engagement with peer feedback in high school English writing.Therefore,this study explores students’ affective,behavioral,and cognitive engagement in peer feedback activities based on Process Writing Theory,The Three-Dimensional Model of Learning Engagement,and Interaction Hypothesis Theory to further understand the factors that influence students’ engagement.This paper is trying to finger out the following two questions.The first one,what is students’ entirety learning engagement in peer feedback and what about each dimension(affective engagement,behavioral engagement,cognitive engagement)? The second one,what are the factors that influence students’ learning engagement in English writing peer feedback?The participants of this study are students from four classes in the second year in a Harbin high school,all subjects have peer feedback experience in high school English writing class.This paper combines quantitative and qualitative data for analysis.177 valid questionnaires are collected as quantitative data.To complement the quantitative data,this study conducts semi-structured interviews with four students and then interview texts are analyzed by three-level coding method.The conclusions of this study are as follows:firstly,the results show that students’ whole engagement is at high level.Students are able to engage in peer feedback in writing actively.In terms of the engagement in different dimensions,students have the highest behavioral engagement,the second highest affective engagement,all of which at the high level of engagement.However,students’ cognitive engagement is low,which is at the medium level.In terms of behavior,students are able to provide feedback from both the roles of feedback provider and receiver,and revise their own compositions based on the feedback received from others.In terms of emotion,most students agree on the effectiveness of peer feedback and willing to participate in it,but a small number of students questioned peers’ability to provide high-quality feedback.However,the results of cognitive engagement show that students lack appropriate feedback strategies as well as task management skills.Secondly,questionnaires and interview texts reveal that several factors influence students’ engagement,including gender,English grades,frequency of participation in feedback,and ways to engage in feedback.Girls are better engaged in peer feedback than boys.English grades are positively correlated with students’ engagement,to be more specifically,the higher the grades,the higher the engagement.The times of take part in feedback is negatively correlated with students’ engagement,the more times students participate,the lower the engagement.As expected,students who participate in the feedback anonymously are significantly more engaged than those who are not.Finally,based on students’ engagement in peer feedback and the influencing factors,this paper provides corresponding suggestions for improving students’ engagement in peer feedback.Teachers should pay more attention to students’ individual characteristics according to the actual situation.It is wise to conduct peer feedback training before organizing peer feedback activities.The above suggestions may help increase students’ engagement in peer feedback and thus maximize the effectiveness of peer feedback.