Full paper at: http://www.lth.se/fileadmin/lth/genombrottet/konferens2012/12_Hedin.pdf This paper/presentation describes a method for students to give each other written feedback in academic writing using a Google Docs as a Social Annotation (SA) tool. Student attitudes to using this method has been evaluated, along with their attitudes towards using digital documents as opposed to paper based documents in various education related situations. The results show that the method described was highly appreciated, and furthermore showed that the students in the study already read digitally distributed documents on screen rather than printing them, and that they were very positive to using digital documents rather than paper based documents. It is argued that the method used can be generalized to other kinds of document based discussions such as seminars discussing papers, and that the positive attitude towards using digital documents can be further increased with current and upcoming technical solutions such as HTML5 and the iPad.

1. Peer Feedback in Academic Writing
using Google Docs
2012-08-30
• Björn Hedin
• KTH Royal Institute of Technology
• Media Technology
• Stockholm, Sweden
• bjornh@kth.se

2. Annotation and Social Annotation
• Annotations:
- “marks on (or attached to) readingmatter” including
underlining, highlighting and comments.
• Different from Notes
- “marks that are not co-located with the text to which
they refer”.
• Plenty of research indicate that notes and annotations
are very important for learning.
• Social annotation tools add a collaboration aspect to
annotations, which allows users to
- share,
- interact and
- collaborate on annotations attached to documents.

3. Social Annotation Tools
• Demo
- Diigo
- Google Docs/Drive
- Crocodoc

4. What We Have Done
• Started with peer feedback in academic writing in 2004
- Either comments in separate threads or problematic
commenting in word documents
• B.Sc. Thesis in 2010 investigated using SA tools instead,
promising results
• 2011 – Tests in 2 groups, good results
• 2012 – Google Docs much improved, full scale test
• Investigated
- What are the students’ (and teachers’) attitudes to using
Google Docs for Peer Feedback?
- What are the student’s attitudes to the use of screen vs.
paper when reading documents?
- Which effects can recent and upcoming technical
developments have on the above two questions?

5. Material
• B.Sc. Degree project course
• Group supervision
- Meet 6 times and give written and oral feedback to each
other on progress of report.
- Written in pairs. 74 students produced 37 final reports
(exjobb).
- About 8-10 students per groups meaning 4-5 reports.
- Hand in report about a week before seminar and use SA
tool (google docs) for Peer Feedback Marking.
- Discuss on seminars, often using projector.
• Evaluated using questionnarie (60% response rate),
focus groups and interviews with teachers.
• Demo

6. Results: Using Google Docs for
Writing
• 11% of students prefer word processor over Google
Docs when writing individual reports
• 89% prefer using Google Docs when writing group- or
pair reports
• Main problem seen with Google Docs was possibilities
to format exactly as you want. Also better
dictionaries.
• Most students used google docs for writing and in the
final version imported into MS Word for final layout.

7. Reading on Screen vs Paper
40%
35%
30%
25% 100%
20% 80%
15% 60%2
10% 40%
20%
5%
0%
0%
“If given a pdf-file to read before a seminar, how
often do you read it on screen compared to
printing it on paper.”

8. Why Screen and Why Paper?
• Why screen?
- Simpler to read it on a screen than to print it
- Environmental aspects
- Economical aspects
- The ability to search in the texts
- Easier to organize files than paper
• Why Paper?
- Most mentioned a better reading experience, especially
for longer texts.
- 8 of 26 mentioned better possibilities to annotate the text

9. But…
60%
50% Very Easy
40%
Quite Easy
30%
Moderately
20% difficult/easy
Quite Difficult
10%
Very Difficult
0%
"How easy is it to comment using Google
Docs?"

10. Usefulness of feedback
Usefulness of getting written peer feedback, written
supervisor feedback and oral feedback (scale 1-5, 5 is best)
5
4.5
4
3.5
Written Peer
3 Feedback (σ = 0.86)
2.5 Written Supervisor
2 Feedback (σ = 0.87)
1.5 Oral Feedback (σ =
1 1.10
0.5
0

11. Usefulness of feedback (2)
• 4 student thought the written group feedback was
more useful than the written supervisor feedback,
• 21 students thought the written supervisor feedback
was better than the written group feedback,
• 13 students thought they were equally useful.

12. Comments in Document or in
Separate Thread?
80%
70%
60% Clearly Google Docs
50%
Google Docs
40%
30%
Undecided
20%
10% Separate Thread
0%
"“Is it best to comment on reports Cleary Separate
directly the document (as in Google Thread
Docs) or in a separate threaded
forum?"

13. Problems?
• Not really many problems found, but maybe…
- Pdf files doesn’t work well with Google Docs
- Perhaps more focus on details

14. Benefits
• Peer Feedback Marking in general a very good peer
learning activity (see research by Nancy Falchikov)
- Student get insights in other theses and problems
- Useful to give and receive feedback
• Comments in context
• Increased interaction among the students in giving
feedback.
• Simple matters (spelling and so on) easily addressed
• Seminar time can be spent with well-prepared
students
• Students really read and comment texts
- Difficult to get away with not reading the texts
• So simple that even teachers want to use it

15. Future and Conclusions
• Increased use of tablets like iPad
- Even easier to read and annotate than on computers
• Constantly better cloud-based word processing with
annotation features
• SA tools can be used for much more!
• Students and teachers were all very enthusiastic, so
it’s worth giving a try!