“With Tension Comes a Little Work”: Motivation and Safety in Online Peer Review

Introduction

As the internet enables a greater sharing of student work, the trend to share work amongst students has been widely lauded for its pedagogical benefits. Students sharing online has the potential to activate the social aspects of institutional learning environments (Castek, 2013; Wheeler, 2010) and increase student motivation (Mills, 2010; Vetter, 2014) by providing a wider audience (Lammers, 2012). By allowing students to collaborate to create a publicly shared work, students learn to negotiate with one another and reflect deeply on what goes into quality writing (Lundin, 2008; Warschauer & Liaw, 2006; Vetter, 2014).

While these interactive spaces have been championed for promoting engagement and motivation, educators would do well to ask if some students are adversely affected by the semi-public nature of these online spaces. If so, is their privacy and achievement compromised? And if compromised, how and why?