An Investigation of Digital Peer Response: an Individual Differences Approach(1/3)

Peer response has been recognized as an effective instructional strategy. This strategy can not only improvestudents’ writing quality but also increase their learning effectiveness and self-regulated skills for synthesisand analysis activities. However, most of previous studies focus on the effectiveness of peer response andignore how individual differences influence students’ reactions to peer response. The results from our pilotstudy indicate that individual differences play an important role and paper-based peer response is noteffective. Therefore, there is a need to develop digital peer response systems. To this end, the proposedproject aims to build a digital peer response system to enhance the effectiveness of peer response and toexamine the effects of individual differences on peer response. In order to examine this issue deeply, thisproject covers three dimensions of individual differences, including prior knowledge, cognitive styles, andgender differences. In addition to traditional statistics, two intelligent techniques will also be applied toconduct data analyses, i.e., data mining, and lag sequential analysis. By doing so, comprehensive results canbe obtained. The results from the empirical studies will be employed to create two outputs: (1) Dynamic UserModels and (2) Design Guidelines. The former is presented as graphic-based descriptions to illustrate howcognitive styles, prior knowledge, and gender differences influence student’ reactions to peer response atdifferent stages. On the other hand, the latter can help instructors undertake peer response activities and helpdesigners develop a digital peer response system that can accommodate students’ individual differences.