The Impact of Synchronous and Asynchronous Online Peer Review Activities on Students’ Academic Writing Skills

Peer review activities have a positive effect on improving the students’ writing skills. This paper ims to investigate the impacts of online peer review activities which were conducted synchronously and asynchronously. Pre-test was administered before the training to determine their level of academic writing skills before the treatment. Then, to get the data a total of 70 students were divided into two groups. 35 students were trained to do online peer review activities synchronously, while the other thirty students practiced to do the asynchronous online peer review. After having peer review exercises, they were given a test on how to do the peer review to measure whether the participants had the skills to do the peer review. The students were asked to review their peers’ essays in the next step. Before, they were given a post-test on writing an essay on the topic. The pre-test and post-test results were compared to know the impact of the peer review activities. The finding shows that students’ academic writing skills have improved. However, those who practiced the synchronous online peer review activities had better scores in their academic writing than those who conducted asynchronous online peer review activities. Thus, it can be concluded that online peer review activities positively improved the students’ writing skills.