Mutual Feedback Exchange And Peer Assessment During Text Revision In Primary School

This paper aims to highlight how text revision in primary schools, through the use of collaborative approaches, can be an opportunity to promote the development of peer assessment skills by exchanging mutual feedback. Starting from the analysis of practices related to text composition (audio and video-recorded) collected by graduating students in the Teacher Training Course (University of Milan-Bicocca), in contexts where writing is considered a socio-cultural practice, it became evident how both teachers and pupils can be protagonists in the revision of texts despite the fact of its complexity (Bereiter, Scardamalia, 1995). For this to be possible, however, it is necessary for revision to become a subject of teaching that enables reflection upon what needs to be corrected, what strategies should be put in place and who oversees correction. In addition, it is essential that certain conditions are fulfilled. Firstly, it is important to create a relational atmosphere within the class in which pupils realize that all texts are changeable and can always be improved. In this way, revision does not become a “chase after errors” but encourages pupils to propose changes to correct the text and to provide formative evaluations, in the way that they indicate to their peers the actions they can take to improve the text. Secondly, in order to develop pupils' competence in providing feedback and mutual evaluation, it is necessary to propose collective revision teaching practices in which the teacher works together with the pupils to identify what can be corrected in a text, how it can be corrected and what strategies should be used. Without this type of collaborative revision, which requires a lot of teaching time, the risk is that feedback will be superficial, focusing only on the orthographic aspects of the text, without developing adequate revision skills such as coherence, cohesion, and relevance of the text to the purpose. Finally, it is necessary to promote a diversity of teaching practices in which pupils can revise texts in small groups, in pairs, by exchanging or self-reviewing them (Teruggi, 2019). Particularly effective have been activities where, for example, texts are hung up in the classroom and displayed for a week, allowing pupils to leave an evaluation of the text and suggestions for its improvement on post-it notes. This strategy is particularly significant both for the author of the text, since he receives more critical and improving looks at his own work, and for the post-it writers, since they have to explain to their peers the strengths and weaknesses of the text, as well as the aspects to be improved. In doing so, authors and reviewers necessarily reflect on the process of writing (planning, transcription and revision). In these school contexts e-learning also offers precious opportunities for peer correction, exchange of feedback and evaluation. On different platforms (Classroom, Padlet, Edomodo, etc.), children write, give feedbacks on word choice, syntactic forms, spelling mistakes and on the global quality of the text.