The effectiveness of collaborative learning: A case study of academic summary

The purpose of this study is to find out how effective peer review is by comparing the results of comments on academic summaries made by 60 students and the teacher of a “Technical English” course at a Japanese university. A checklist of 11 questions is designed for students to conduct their reviews of their peers´ summaries. The improvements of the students as writers are analyzed as a result of teacher´s purposeful intervention by providing an explanation about summary writing and an sample summary to train the students between the first review and the second review. Comparison between the results of the review of the students and those of the teacher which is conducted as the last step of this study is also discussed. Pedagogical implications are considered based on the analyses and the comparison.