The Impact of Online Peer Feedback on Railway Engineering Students' Academic Writing: The Case of Google Docs

Abstract

This study aimed to examine the difference in academic writing performance of railway engineering students after giving feedback to their peers, to determine their views of the benefits of assessing writing tasks on Google Docs, and to explore their perceptions of the roles of giving feedback and correcting peers' paragraphs in improving academic writing performance. The participants were 40 railway engineering students at Iran University of Science and Technology. The instruments were pre and post-tests of writing along with two open-ended questions. The results revealed that the experimental group performed better on the posttest after giving feedback to their peers. Assessing without time limitation and disruption, correcting writing tasks more precisely, and enhancing lexical and grammatical knowledge were the benefits of assessing peers' writing tasks in Google Docs. Students also held the view that it could help them get familiar with the academic writing principles and how to correct writing tasks.