Giving Feedback to Peers in an Online Inquiry-Learning Environment

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.