supervisors: Pantelis papadopoulos & reza farrokhnia
Peer feedback is used more and more at different levels of education, from secondary school to professional courses. It started as a replacement or addition to the teachers feedback, now it is more and more seen as a learning tool. There are several reasons why giving feedback to peers and receiving feedback from them can contribute to learning. While giving feedback students are cognitively involved with the material, which leads to its better understanding. By receiving feedback from peers, students can get a bigger amount and more varied feedback than just from their teacher, which can help in improving their performance or products.
However, to be beneficial for learning the processes of giving and receiving feedback should be properly organized. Several studies demonstrated that students may be quite reluctant in participating in providing peer-feedback activities due to various issues, to name just a few: the lack of trust to the received feedback, not shared assessment standards, fear of jeopardizing personal relationships, etc. Therefore, studying how the processes of giving and receiving peer feedback (peer assessment, peer reviewing, etc.) can be organized and supported can make their application in education more effective.
Example research questions within this theme:
- What kind of guidance (training, instruction, script) should students receive to learn from peer assessment the most?
- How does the type of the task influence the organization of the peer assessment process?
- What students’ personal characteristics influence effective peer assessment process?
- What cognitive processes are involved in providing effective feedback?
- What are the characteristics of good feedback?
Students can specify the research question based on their own interests and conduct their study in different educational contexts.