SURF project: Improving students’ argumentative essay writing

In this project, we aim to explore the effects of an online peer feedback support tool on various aspects of learning and writing where students with authentic essay writing tasks engage in thoughtful criticism of the work and/or performance of their peers using given criteria. The tool allows students to provide structured feedback to their peers’ essays reciprocally based on the characteristics of a high-quality argumentative essay. The various feedback features in this tool will contain question prompts about the peers’ actual work and/or performance (how am I going/doing?), or indicate a direction by delineating a goal to be achieved (where to go next?).