CISLL affiliate Dr. Christine Malecki has a story to tell.
It starts in 1997 when Malecki was a practicing school psychologist in Iowa.
She wanted to help children learn how to write better using curriculum-based measurements (CBMs). Teachers use CBMs in their classrooms to assess students’ progress on a number of skills (reading, writing, arithmetic) fairly easily.
A CBM for writing might involve a student completing a prompt like, “One day I went for an airplane ride and…”. The teacher can score the response and keep a log of the student’s progress.
Here is where our story begins.
Malecki knew that there were different ways to score the writing CBM. A simple measure was just counting the number of words the student wrote. A more complex method would require calculating and summing scores based on grammatical accuracy or complexity (or another component of writing) across a number of words in the writing.
“The more complicated measure seemed like it would be more accurate, but it seemed cumbersome to do.” recounted Malecki.
When she joined the psychology faculty at NIU, she wondered whether the more complex scoring method was worth the effort.
Like any good scientist, she collected data. She and her graduate students timed how long it would take to score around 1,000 writing samples taken from first- through eighth-graders using both simple and complex methods.
“The more complex method took three times longer to score than the simpler method, but it only correlated more highly with standardized measures of writing for students beyond the fourth grade. Up to fourth grade, the simpler method was fine,” explained Malecki.
That finding in itself would save first- through fourth-grade teachers a lot of time grading.
But that finding wasn’t enough for Malecki.
“I remember a graduate student at the time wondering whether just having students write more often would increase writing skill,” mused Malecki. That would jibe with a lot of informal advice from professional writers—to improve your writing, just write more.
So Malecki and Jennifer Jewell, her graduate student, had students write either weekly or daily for several weeks.
Counter to the advice from professional writers, students who wrote weekly improved more than students who wrote every day.
“It was burnout. The students who wrote every day just got tired. In fact, many of them told us so in no uncertain terms in their writing samples,” laughed Malecki.
Yet the weekly writing assignment did increase writing skill, although perhaps not to the level of a professional novelist.
This gave another of Malecki’s students, Julie Alitto, an idea. Why not make a CBM assessment into an intervention? This was a fairly novel idea at the time.
So, in a new study, Alitto and Malecki had students write in one of two conditions. The practice-only condition wrote weekly in much the same way as students in the prior study. In a goal-and-feedback condition, the students were reminded about the goal to improve their writing and given feedback from their instructors.
As one might expect, giving students feedback and reminding them of their writing goals improved students’ writing skill more than just writing alone.
“We were pleased with the results, but teachers told us that it was just impractical to give feedback to each and every writing sample,” Malecki said.
Then Alitto got an idea.
Why not have students give feedback to one another?
Peer-mediated intervention (PMI) is when students give each other feedback in a structured environment.
Alitto tested the idea of using PMI to increase children’s writing skill, and her dissertation was born. In an experiment, she showed that using well-crafted worksheets, students working in pairs can give accurate feedback to their partner.
“It worked. Students’ writing improved as a function of peer-mediated intervention. I think it surprised many teachers who thought that having students grading each other was just an ‘easy way out’,’’ explained Malecki. The PMI research was published in the Journal of School Psychology by Malecki and former student Sammi Coyle, now a professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey.
In fact, peer-mediated intervention has caught on in the education community. Students learn by receiving and giving feedback, and teachers can catch up on sleep rather than grading late into the night.
“There is definitely more research to be done to understand the boundary conditions of when PMI works and when it doesn’t,” said Malecki. For example, does it work for all ages? What components of PMI are most instrumental for change? Does it promote social skills?
Her story is not over, but a provisional ending seems appropriate.
Peer-mediated intervention may very well be instrumental to the future of education, one suited for both face-to-face and online courses, especially with massively open online courses (MOOCS). As the old saying goes, “No one learns more than the teacher.”
If you are an instructor wishing to try PMI in your classroom, Malecki has four suggestions for you:
It starts in 1997 when Malecki was a practicing school psychologist in Iowa.
She wanted to help children learn how to write better using curriculum-based measurements (CBMs). Teachers use CBMs in their classrooms to assess students’ progress on a number of skills (reading, writing, arithmetic) fairly easily.
A CBM for writing might involve a student completing a prompt like, “One day I went for an airplane ride and…”. The teacher can score the response and keep a log of the student’s progress.
Here is where our story begins.
Malecki knew that there were different ways to score the writing CBM. A simple measure was just counting the number of words the student wrote. A more complex method would require calculating and summing scores based on grammatical accuracy or complexity (or another component of writing) across a number of words in the writing.
“The more complicated measure seemed like it would be more accurate, but it seemed cumbersome to do.” recounted Malecki.
When she joined the psychology faculty at NIU, she wondered whether the more complex scoring method was worth the effort.
Like any good scientist, she collected data. She and her graduate students timed how long it would take to score around 1,000 writing samples taken from first- through eighth-graders using both simple and complex methods.
“The more complex method took three times longer to score than the simpler method, but it only correlated more highly with standardized measures of writing for students beyond the fourth grade. Up to fourth grade, the simpler method was fine,” explained Malecki.
That finding in itself would save first- through fourth-grade teachers a lot of time grading.
But that finding wasn’t enough for Malecki.
“I remember a graduate student at the time wondering whether just having students write more often would increase writing skill,” mused Malecki. That would jibe with a lot of informal advice from professional writers—to improve your writing, just write more.
So Malecki and Jennifer Jewell, her graduate student, had students write either weekly or daily for several weeks.
Counter to the advice from professional writers, students who wrote weekly improved more than students who wrote every day.
“It was burnout. The students who wrote every day just got tired. In fact, many of them told us so in no uncertain terms in their writing samples,” laughed Malecki.
Yet the weekly writing assignment did increase writing skill, although perhaps not to the level of a professional novelist.
This gave another of Malecki’s students, Julie Alitto, an idea. Why not make a CBM assessment into an intervention? This was a fairly novel idea at the time.
So, in a new study, Alitto and Malecki had students write in one of two conditions. The practice-only condition wrote weekly in much the same way as students in the prior study. In a goal-and-feedback condition, the students were reminded about the goal to improve their writing and given feedback from their instructors.
As one might expect, giving students feedback and reminding them of their writing goals improved students’ writing skill more than just writing alone.
“We were pleased with the results, but teachers told us that it was just impractical to give feedback to each and every writing sample,” Malecki said.
Then Alitto got an idea.
Why not have students give feedback to one another?
Peer-mediated intervention (PMI) is when students give each other feedback in a structured environment.
Alitto tested the idea of using PMI to increase children’s writing skill, and her dissertation was born. In an experiment, she showed that using well-crafted worksheets, students working in pairs can give accurate feedback to their partner.
“It worked. Students’ writing improved as a function of peer-mediated intervention. I think it surprised many teachers who thought that having students grading each other was just an ‘easy way out’,’’ explained Malecki. The PMI research was published in the Journal of School Psychology by Malecki and former student Sammi Coyle, now a professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey.
In fact, peer-mediated intervention has caught on in the education community. Students learn by receiving and giving feedback, and teachers can catch up on sleep rather than grading late into the night.
“There is definitely more research to be done to understand the boundary conditions of when PMI works and when it doesn’t,” said Malecki. For example, does it work for all ages? What components of PMI are most instrumental for change? Does it promote social skills?
Her story is not over, but a provisional ending seems appropriate.
Peer-mediated intervention may very well be instrumental to the future of education, one suited for both face-to-face and online courses, especially with massively open online courses (MOOCS). As the old saying goes, “No one learns more than the teacher.”
If you are an instructor wishing to try PMI in your classroom, Malecki has four suggestions for you:
- Identify and target your skill of interest,
- Teach the students the routine of how to assess each other, presumably by using clear worksheets or guides,
- Think about how to pair students. Having two low-skilled students assessing each other may be problematic, and
- Monitor the students’ behavior. They need to be on task. If you are interested in learning more about PMI, Malecki and Coyle have a chapter in an upcoming book, Peers as Change Agents, published by Oxford University Press. It is due out next summer.
About the author: Keith Millis is on CISLL’s executive board and is a professor of psychology at NIU.
