Giving feedback to peers: how do students learn from it?

Traditionally, peer assessment was seen as a replacement for teacher assessment but nowadays it is being used in education as a learning tool more and more. Giving feedback to peers is a part of a peer assessment process that is less studied than receiving feedback from peers, especially at the secondary school level. This dissertation aimed to address this gap by investigating the ways to maximize students’ learning from giving feedback.

Each of four experimental studies zoomed into one of the factors that could influence students’ learning from giving feedback. In particular, the following factors were covered: the form of giving feedback (comments or smileys), the origin of assessment criteria (self-created or pre-defined), the quality level of the reviewed products (low, high or mixed) and the type of the reviewed products (concept maps or answers to open-ended questions). All studies were conducted in online inquiry learning environments in a STEM context. Participants were secondary school students from the Netherlands and Russia.

The obtained results indicated that even a brief moment of giving feedback could be beneficial for students’ learning. Commenting was shown to lead to more learning than grading as well as giving feedback on familiar products of the same or lower level than the current level of the feedback provider. Moreover, it was found that secondary school students were able to give content-related feedback even without being provided with assessment criteria and the quality of given feedback could influence students’ learning. These findings could guide educational practitioners in the process of designing and implementing giving feedback in the classroom.