Digital writing for a digital age peer editing in traditional versus digital writing formats.

摘要

Understanding the merits and demerits of new technology and how it may or may not work within traditional pedagogical methods is important. This study, therefore, examined the effects of traditional versus digital peer-editing to understand how digital peer-editing affects student writing achievement in a rural public middle school environment. It used a pre-test, sequential explanatory strategy in its approach that followed a quantitative to qualitative sequence. Quantitative data scores were collected first, analyzed, and then used to form a qualitative data-gathering procedure in the form of focus groups. Six middle school Language Arts classes were divided into two peer-editing groups: traditional peer-editing and digital peer-editing. The digital peer-editing group was considered the experimental group while the traditional peer editing group was the control. Educators then taught each group of students using the respective traditional or digital peer-editing techniques over the course of two months, with each student writing a total of three essays: a baseline essay with no peer-editing involved, and two more essays that utilized the respective form of peer editing. The findings showed significantly different results in Grade 6 participants' essays within the writing strands of Mechanics and Conventions and Language Use and Style. The discussion of these findings points to relevance of educational technology use, educational technology training, and the use of digital writing tools to engage and assist today's students.