A meta-analysis of the effect of peer feedback on academic achievement in the STEM fields of higher education

Abstract

Recently, there has been a significant increase in the use of peer feedback in higher education. However, the evidence of the effect of peer feedback on students’ academic achievement does not seem conclusive and, to our knowledge, there has not yet been a meta-analysis of the effect of peer feedback on general academic achievement in the STEM fields of higher education. Therefore, we conducted a meta-analysis to determine whether peer feedback is beneficial to STEM higher education students’ academic achievement. The final data set for the meta-analysis consisted of 286 effect sizes from 90 independent samples in 75 studies, with a total of over 14,000 participants. All effect sizes were calculated as Cohen’s d values. A random-effects model used to synthesise the effect sizes indicated a significant positive summary effect size (d = .421, SE = .037, 95% CI = .350, .493, p = .000). The variance of the true effect sizes (T2) was .069. The Qw value of 644.167 was significant (p = .000) and the I2 value of 88.512 was high. Therefore, in order to identify the source of the between-study heterogeneity, moderator analyses were conducted to evaluate the influence of various methodological quality characteristics and peer feedback intervention characteristics on the effect of a peer feedback intervention. The results of this study will provide researchers, policy makers and practitioners with the information they need to decide whether or not to use peer feedback and to be able to design peer feedback interventions for maximal effectiveness.