An inductive approach to developing students’ awareness of useful written peer feedback

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Peer feedback activities in higher education stimulate critical thinking and reflective learning. However, both research and practice show that students may be concerned about the quality of the peer feedback they receive. To address this, we developed an inductive teaching intervention aimed at enhancing students’ feedback literacy while exploring their understanding of ‘quality’ feedback. This was achieved by asking students to select and justify examples of useful, received peer feedback. Our findings revealed variability in the content of the peer feedback examples that students selected as useful, as well as in their justifications for these choices, highlighting content specificity, correctional guidance, and motivational comments. Evaluations and a focus group interview showed that the inductive approach increased students’ awareness of useful feedback characteristics and underscored the learning effect of the intervention. The findings also suggest that effective feedback principles are similar for both peer and teacher feedback, highlighting the link between giving and receiving feedback in developing feedback literacy.