Giving and receiving peer feedback is seen as an important vehicle for deep learning. Defining assessment criteria is a first step in giving feedback to peers and can play an important role in feedback providers’ learning. However, there is no consensus about whether it is better to ask students to think about assessment criteria themselves or to provide them with ready-made assessment criteria. The current experimental study aims at answering this question in a secondary school STEM educational context, during a physics lesson in an online inquiry learning environment. As a part of their lesson, participants (n = 93) had to give feedback on two concept maps, and were randomly assigned to one of two conditions—being provided or not being provided with assessment criteria. Students’ post-test scores, the quality of feedback given, and the quality of students’ own concept maps were analyzed to determine if there was an effect of condition on feedback providers’ learning. Results did not reveal an advantage of one condition over the other in terms of learning gains. Possible implications for practice and directions for further research are discussed.
Giving feedback to peers can be a powerful learning tool because of the feedback provider’s active cognitive involvement with the products to be reviewed. The quality of peers’ products is naturally an important factor that might influence not only the quality of the feedback that is given, but also the learning arising from this process. This experimental study investigated the effect of the level of quality of the reviewed product on the knowledge acquisition of feedback providers, as well as the role of prior knowledge in this. Dutch secondary-school students (n = 77) were assigned to one of three conditions, which varied in the quality of the learning products (concept maps) on which students had to give feedback while working in an online physics inquiry learning environment. Post-test knowledge scores, the quality of students’ own concept maps and the quality of the feedback given were analyzed to determine any effect of condition on the learning of feedback providers. Students providing feedback on the lower-quality concept maps gave better feedback and had higher post-test scores. There was no interaction with level of prior knowledge. Possible implications for practice and further research directions are discussed.
Giving feedback to peers can be a valuable learning experience for a feedback provider. However, different types of products require different types of feedback, which, in turn, may lead to different learning outcomes. The current study investigates the effect on the learning of feedback providers of reviewing different types of products. Secondary school students (n =127) were randomly assigned to one of the two conditions: giving peer feedback on either concept maps or answers to open-ended test questions. Both types of product, created by the researchers, were comparable with regard to content: they included the same misconceptions and were both of average quality. Giving peer feedback was part of a chemistry lesson delivered in an online inquiry learning environment. Students’ post-test scores, their own learning products, and the quality of the provided feedback were analysed to check for an effect on learning. There was no difference in post-test scores between the conditions, but the quality of the provided feedback predicted post-test scores. This indicates that it is not the type of product reviewed that matters, but the effort that students put into giving feedback. Possible implications for practice and further research directions are discussed.
Giving feedback to peers is more often viewed as a learning tool rather than as an assessment tool or a replacement for teacher feedback. Such learning can be attributed to the fact that while giving feedback, students should be actively cognitively involved with the material in order to evaluate a peer’s product and suggest ways to improve it. Peer feedback is usually given on bigger scale products, such as essays, reports or group projects, and constitutes a separate task requiring substantial time. There has been very little research done on the possibility of including a feedback-giving activity in a regular school lesson. This chapter contributes to that area of research by giving an overview of the results of four (quasi-)experimental studies in which secondary school children gave feedback on relatively small-scale products (concept maps) while working in an online inquiry-learning environment. Concept maps were chosen for peer reviewing because they are compact products that stimulate higher order thinking and can fit into an inquiry-learning process very naturally. In addition, research indicates that when reviewing concept maps, students may get deeper understanding than when reviewing other products. Our goal was to investigate what factors of the feedback-giving process influence the learning of feedback providers and how that process should be organised to benefit this type of learning the most. Based on the findings, practical recommendations for using peer feedback in a real-life classroom are formulated. The chapter concludes with the directions for further research in the area of giving feedback to peers.
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