Educators find peer interactions through review and evaluation extremely valuable. The transition to online learning has accelerated the use of peer feedback in various levels of education and programs. This is beneficial to their learning as it facilitates meaningful engagement opportunities with peers and course content multiple times at a deeper level.
Peer feedback must be motivational and critical that aiming to enhance their productivity, quality of work, and knowledge retention. Peer feedback should be considered as a professional assessment by students and not personal criticism. The teacher plays a crucial role in guiding students to give and receive feedback constructively.
This blog post will enable its readers to understand the actual gist of peer feedback, its advantages and how instructors can motivate their students who receive negative comments from their peers.
For example, peer feedback can include a student commenting on a classmate's essay draft, highlighting strengths and suggesting areas for improvement.
What is Peer Feedback?
Peer feedback refers to the comments and suggestions that students receive from each other. It is a collaborative activity wherein students are encouraged to read, converse, and provide their thoughts and opinions on other students’ work to enhance their learning through scaffolding (Kuyyogsuy, 2019). Effective peer feedback focuses on specific actions and behaviours rather than personal traits, ensuring that comments are constructive and actionable.
In this interactive learning, students communicate task-related information and data to their peers, which are synthesized to enhance students’ self-reflection and academic performance (Huisman et al, 2019; Lui et al, 2001). When providing feedback, it is important to focus on key points and offer clear, actionable suggestions that can guide improvement. Additionally, considering the person receiving the feedback and maintaining a respectful tone helps foster a positive and supportive environment. Proven by research, constructive criticism from someone of the same age or position helps students to be more receptive to the different perspectives compared to when feedback is provided by an authoritative figure. Not to discount the constructive criticism from professors and experts, peer-to-peer feedback is an excellent complementary method for sharing and creating knowledge. When students deliver negative feedback, best practices include being clear, constructive, and respectful, focusing on specific behaviours or outcomes to support growth and understanding.
Benefits of Peer Feedback and Criticism
Improve Student Learning
Peer feedback allows students to share their skills and expertise. Acknowledging students' hard work and perseverance is important, as peer feedback helps them stay on the right track toward success. Sharing ideas and advice through peer feedback enables students to develop their skills and learn from one another.
Providing more examples and specific examples supports feedback and helps peers better understand suggestions for improvement. Effective feedback helps students succeed by identifying areas for improvement and encouraging ongoing effort. Apart from instilling new knowledge in their peers, the process of providing feedback encourages students to engage with the course content multiple times, which improves information retention
Here's an example of how students learn from the peer evaluation process on Kritik360:
Reduce Feedback Turnaround Time
"The teacher's point of view is always great but sometimes you don't get a concrete answer as to what you could improve and how you could do it simply because they don't have time to write that out for each student. Having 4-5 students that also did the same project critique your response is extremely helpful because they know that they're getting graded on their evaluations of your work so they give a lot of thought and effort into their responses" — Student Testimony, 2021
In the traditional pedagogical approach in which only instructors provide feedback to students, it often becomes difficult for instructors to deliver meaningful feedback quickly and frequently. This delay in feedback can limit the students’ ability to improve as the relevance or significance of the recommendations decay over time. However, with peer feedback, students are empowered to receive quick, quality assessments on their work that add diverse perspectives to their learning, which can be incorporated into their final assignments promptly. Teachers can follow up with students after peer feedback to ensure progress and drive change within the classroom.
Improve Students’ Critical Thinking Skills
Peer feedback helps students develop their critical and analytical thinking skills. They are empowered to diagnose various problems and identify their peers’ strengths and weaknesses that engage the Prefrontal Cortex part of their brain, which is responsible for higher-order thinking. Furthermore, students become more self-aware of their writing skills as they constantly provide critical and constructive remarks in a manner that is professional, helpful and motivational. Students can respond thoughtfully to feedback, and should be mindful that body language during peer review sessions can affect communication and the effectiveness of their feedback.
For information on how to introduce Kritik360 to your students, see the Kritik360 Syllabus Insert.
Improve Self-Reflection and Collaboration
Peer feedback allows students to gain a better understanding of their own work. Advice from peers and teachers can help students reflect on their work and drive change for continuous improvement. This prevents students from overestimating and underestimating their skills and abilities. Collaborative assessment that involves peer feedback encourages students to move away from depending on educators as the sole source of feedback to an autonomous system in which each student contributes to each other’s knowledge and learning process.
Watch how Profs. Julie Chamberlin & Michael Jones enable collaboration with Kritik360
Creating a Positive Environment
The establishment of a positive environment has been identified as a critical determinant in ensuring that feedback processes—encompassing negative feedback, constructive feedback, and positive feedback—facilitate meaningful learning outcomes and performance enhancement (Nicol and Milligan, 2006). Within higher education contexts and beyond, the methodological approaches employed in feedback delivery and reception have been demonstrated to significantly influence student motivation, academic performance, and professional development trajectories (Panadero, Brown, and Strijbos, 2016).
A positive environment is conceptualized through the integration of open communication strategies, active listening practices, and empathetic pedagogical approaches (Topping, 2010). When feedback is administered, research suggests that emphasis should be placed on specific behavioural indicators rather than personal characteristics, with actionable recommendations being provided to facilitate student capacity for implementing necessary modifications (van Zundert, Sluijsmans, and van Merriënboer, 2010). The delivery of feedback through clear, respectful methodologies has been shown to enhance student comprehension of key performance criteria and encourage reflective engagement with their learning processes (Reddy and Andrade, 2010).
Meta-analytical evidence suggests that one of the most efficacious approaches to positive environment creation involves the strategic balance of constructive criticism with affirmative commentary (Double, McGrane, and Hopfenbeck, 2020). The highlighting of student strengths alongside areas requiring improvement has been demonstrated to enhance student self-efficacy and motivation, particularly when negative feedback is being communicated (Panadero, Jonsson, and Botella, 2017). Research indicates that the provision of excessive feedback within singular instances can result in cognitive overload and diminished impact of the feedback intervention (Wiliam, 2011). Instead, pedagogical strategies should focus on the most critical performance issues while providing explicit exemplars to guide students toward enhanced outcomes (Ballantyne, Hughes, and Mylonas, 2002).
The encouragement of self-reflective practices and ownership of learning processes has been identified as an essential component of positive educational environments (Boud and Falchikov, 2006). When students are invited to engage with feedback through reflective analysis and self-identification of improvement areas, they demonstrate increased likelihood of assuming responsibility for their developmental trajectories and implementing positive behavioural changes (Seifert and Feliks, 2019). This pedagogical approach has been shown to support not only academic achievement but also prepare students for future professional contexts where feedback mechanisms constitute essential elements of career advancement and skill development (Dweck, 2013).
How should Students Perceive Negative Feedback
It is essential to understand how constant feedback that is perceived as negative or poor can affect a student's motivation to perform at ideal levels. This learning process allows students to differentiate negative criticism from positive criticism, which enables them to understand how to professionally react to the latter. This knowledge is essential to students' personal, academic and professional growth as they learn to keep an open mind and be considerate of all perspectives without being biased by their emotions.
How can Instructors Guide Students to Write Helpful Feedback
Educators who observe students with consistently poor feedback can monitor their progress from time to time and help them improve by offering additional mentoring. They must encourage students to take criticism professionally as part of their preparation for the world outside the educational institution. Instructors can employ the following ways to motivate students who receive poor feedback from their peers:
- Continually monitor the feedback quality provided and received by peers in class discussions.
- Foster resilience among students and help them build their ability to work constructively and objectively with peer feedback.
- Encourage students to provide descriptive feedback instead of allocating grades.
How Instructors Can Use Kritik360 to Motivate Students?
Kritik360 is a peer assessment tool that enables instructors to implement a 360-degree peer feedback loop in their assignments, encouraging students to write critical and motivational feedback to their peers. All evaluations submitted on Kritik360 are anonymous; hence, students only have access to the rubric to write bias-free feedback to their classmates. The feedback loop on Kritik360 is gamified, encouraging students to write better quality feedback.
Kritik360 has been used by over 2 million students and instructors across 200+ institutions across North America.
Create your free Kritik360 account here
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Huisman, B., Saab, N., van den Broek, P., & van Driel, J. (2019). The impact of formative peer feedback on higher education students' academic writing: a Meta-Analysis. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 44(6), 863-880.
Jones, B. D. (2018). Motivating students by design: Practical strategies for professors.
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