Systematic Analyses of Peer and Teacher Feedback: Korean University Students vs. Native English Instructor

How similar or different is Korean students’ peer feedback to their native teacher’s? The present study compared the feedback produced by Korean university students with the feedback by their native English instructor on the same papers using the same feedback prompts. Eleven Korean students reviewed 98 essays of their peers over a semester and produced 661 idea units of feedback while their instructor generated 610 idea units reviewing the same papers. These 1,271 feedback units were analyzed to examine 1) the feedback of the students’ and the instructor’s in quantity and types, 2) the percentage of overlapping feedback between the students’ and the instructor’s, and 3) the percentage of agreement/disagreement between the students’ and the instructor’s feedback. The results show that in quantity, little difference is found between the instructor’s and the students’ feedback. By feedback type, no statistically significant results were found from one-sample t-tests. When asked to comment on the same paper using the same prompts, 48.8% of the students’ feedback overlapped with the instructor’s, while 47.1% addressed topics that the teacher did not mention. Of the overlapping 48.8%, 81.4% of the students’ feedback agreed with and 19.1% disagreed with the instructor’s comments.