Benefits of peer support

Benefits of peer support Peer support refers to some form of help given out by friends, colleagues, or family members when a person is doing something or is in need of something. It may be a need to learn a difficult subject in school, a need to be heard with personal problems,  a need to learn a new task, or a need to be assisted in different things. Peer support could be in the form of teaching, assisting, counseling, or simply listening and either way it can provide these benefits: * When people need something or do something, for instance need help in a school subject or tasks, in new lesson or helping in different cases and so on, and their friends or relatives give s/he helps, that is peer support. It can be a teaching, helping, advising, or listening. 1. Boost confidence Having people around that support a person in every concern or battle in life will definitely improve one’s confidence. Some people literally need a helping hand in solving a problem while others may be content of having friends around only when needed. Whether it’s a health problem, a schoolconcern, or an important decision to make at work, having support from peers will brighten one’s spirits. 2. Enhance skills Support from peers could also benefit people in terms of improved motivation in any activity in life. Through words of encouragement or assistance from friends, one may also learn more and perhaps develop or enhance skills in doing certain things in life. * The help or support can make student think and learn more, thus it will develop or enhance their skills. 3. Improve well-being With strong peer support, people’s emotional and mental well-being will also be boosted. Nothing beats having people to share life’s moments with, including all the ups and downs. In a happy moment, people would love to share these with others and this is also true during tough times in life. With peer support,  life will have more value and meaning. Sometimes peer support is the main thing that makes a person become happy or complete. Life as they say is designed to be shared with other people around.  With peer support, many people will basically become content, whether they are experiencing joy or pain. http://benefitof. net/benefits-of-peer-support/ Peer assessment can involve formative reviews to provide constructive feedback, as well as summative grading: it can also include student involvement in the setting of marking criteria and decisions about evidence of achievement. Self-assessment enables students to become reflective and self-managing, to identify next steps in learning and move forward ‘ under their own steam’. When these two strategies work well, the advantages are significant to all concerned and many of the identified issues can be addressed by: * helping students to see the value and validity of these approaches * ensuring the reliability of student judgements * maximising opportunities for students to learn from peer and self-assessment. Advantages * Helps students to develop insight into their own performance by assessing the work of others. * Develops lifelong skills of evaluation and analysis. * Supports independent and autonomous learning. * Gives students a sense of ownership and thus increases motivation. * Treats assessment as part of learning, so mistakes are seen as opportunities rather than a sign of failure. * Uses external evaluation to provide a model for internal self-assessment of a student’s own learning (metacognition), encouraging deep, rather than surface, learning. * Promotes a ‘ community of scholarship’. * Reduces the amount of teacher assessment but improves the quality. * Time for reflection or discussion with a critical friend can help individuals to ‘ stand back from’ their own work and make sense of others’ comments. * Increases students’ attentiveness for activities such as presentations or group performances by peers (when they are assessing them). * Provides more accurate feedback about processes such as collaborative working (students are often in a better position than teachers to judge individual contributions). * Helps to clarify assessment criteria. * Gives students a wider range of feedback. http://www. teachingexpertise. com/articles/peer-and-self-assessment-2867 Studies have shown that students show a dramatic improvement in academic success when they have significant peer interaction. The reason being is that motivation is one of the key elements when it comes to academic performance. This is especially true with online classes, which are more mainstream than just 5-10 years ago. Motivation helps students stay on top of their studies. Hence, it helps students improve time management. Therefore, students become more productive, and improvements in productivity yields positive academic results. http://goscrib. hubpages. com/hub/Virtual-Classes Most approaches tend to agree, however, that students who surround themselves with peers and influences who value learning and the educational process will also value their own learning and strive to enhance their education. Read more:  Peer Relations and Learning – Peer Relationships, Learning Motivation and Relationships, Classroom Dynamics – Student, Students, Social, and Peers – StateUniversity. com http://education. stateuniversity. com/pages/2315/Peer-Relations-Learning. html#ixzz2AmPO7try In 1978 Lev Vygotsky also presented ideas on the facilitation of learning through experiences mediated by other people. In his explanations, the learner cannot reach full potential without the aid of others. Read more:  Peer Relations and Learning – Peer Relationships, Learning Motivation and Relationships, Classroom Dynamics – Student, Students, Social, and Peers – StateUniversity. com http://education. stateuniversity. com/pages/2315/Peer-Relations-Learning. html#ixzz2AmPq4sGj Kai Peer editing is the second best thing to hiring a professional editor and brings additional benefits to your tech comm team. Editing and reviewing This release is the first time I get to work on a language edit for Release Notes topics, together with a colleague who edits, among others, my own topics which I shouldn’t and couldn’t very well edit myself. Our language edit is one of two editing passes: * The language edit ensures clear and correct language, including grammar, usage, and style guide compliance, in unambiguous, internationally comprehensible English within each topic. * The substantive edit, the second pass, focuses on the structural integrity and usefulness of topics as well as the relationship between topics. The benefits of peer editing 1. Ensure consistency.  It’s a great way to improve consistency and common usage among collaborating writers. And it ensures that your style guide works. You really should have a style guide before you peer edit and then use your experiences and findings to fill in the gaps, throw out what you don’t need and change what doesn’t work. 2. Realise growth opportunities.  Peer editing is a quick and pretty reliable reality check what each writer does and doesn’t do well, relatively speaking, compared to other writers. And I don’t only mean writing weaknesses. When I first started doing peer edits, I was quite humbled to learn that my criticism wasn’t exactly helping. So I had to figure out how to offer constructive criticism — which I think has made me better and more complete writer. Depending on your team, you may even find that you can teach each other to some degree. 3. Encourage mutual trust.  It gives all writers a formal, regular opportunity to check in with each other’s work. It can anchor the good practice to take responsibility for one another’s work — and to learn to listen to others criticize your work. In the best case, it helps colleagues to grow into a team where people trust each other. 4. Enhance group dynamics.  If you’ve come to trust each other, you’ll find you collaborate better. Knowing each other’s strengths, you can become more efficient and more productive as  a team, just as members of a sports team knows almost instinctively how the others act. http://kaiweber. wordpress. com/2011/06/30/4-benefits-of-peer-editing-documentation/ feedback from more advanced peers can provide scaffolding and can reduce problems associated with peer feedback, such as the lack of credibility of peer evaluation and reluctance to use feedback from peers Through feedback, the writer learns where he or she has misled or confused the readers by not supplying sufficient information or with illogical organization, lack of the development of ideas, or inappropriate words choice or tense. This feature increases the degree of social interaction and negotiation of meaning, and offers potentially unlimited participation unlike traditional modes, where group conversation, work submission, and feedback exchange are held during limited class time In the online environment, peer feedback activity is greatly facilitated by computer functions that allow students to compose, revise, and edit their writing more conveniently. Students do not have to waste time repetitively writing the entire paper for the peer feedback process. * With the help of Computer, students can revise or edit their writing easily. Their time is not also wasted just because of writing several times in the paper. the online environment allows two-way communication between readers and writers without time or place dependence. This feature increases the degree of social interaction and negotiation of meaning, and offers potentially unlimited participation unlike traditional modes, where group conversation, work submission, and feedback exchange are held during limited class time. peer feedback training is necessary for students and even more essential when used with the students that exhibit low English proficiency because it might be one an important factor that leads to the success or failure of writing instruction and the students’ writing development. Raveewan Wanchid, Efficacy of the Use of Electronic Peer Feedback with Mixed Ability Students in the EFL Writing Class: Language and Cultural Barriers, The Asian Conference on Language Learning 2012