How peer feedback with regulation scripts contributes to the development of critical thinking in dialogues: strengthening cognitive and affective feedback content

Abstract

ABSTRACT Although peer feedback has been proposed as an instructional strategy for cultivating critical thinking, high-quality peer feedback is difficult to obtain. Regulation scripts are a promising scaffold for this activity. Besides, few previous studies have explored the dynamic relationship between feedback content and critical thinking. Therefore, this study investigated the effects of peer feedback with regulation scripts on students’ critical thinking, cognitive and affective feedback content, and how feedback content is related to critical thinking. Thirty-four students were randomly divided into nine groups and assigned to one of two conditions: regulation scripts (experimental groups, EGs) and general scripts (control groups, CGs). EGs’ students were instructed to argue about the feedback content with prompting questions, and CGs’ students completed the tasks with task-related hints. The results revealed that peer feedback with regulation scripts is effective in promoting critical thinking, suggestive comments on cognitive content and positive comments on affective content. Moreover, the epistemic network analysis results indicated that the EGs showed a stronger connection between suggestive/informative comments and creating for cognitive content, while regarding affective content, they showed stronger connections between various affective comments and higher-order critical thinking. Overall, the study yields new insights into the relationship between feedback content and critical thinking.