Investigating working adult learners’ feedback literacy in online project-based learning: a convergent mixed methods study

Teachers’ feedback literacy is a focus of increasing attention in higher education. It may be framed through intentional design decisions, inter-relational aspects of engagement and pragmatic considerations of enacted curricula. Thus, teachers’ feedback literacy is connected to both the enacted curriculum and students’ relationship to feedback. How these connections take shape in particular approaches to the curriculum, affecting students’ roles in feedback and evaluation is not as well-understood. This paper presents findings from an intervention aimed at developing students’ peer feedback and self-evaluation skills in an undergraduate business course. Peer feedback and self-evaluation are increasingly common modes of engaging students as active participants in feedback and evaluation processes. It is therefore worthwhile to understand the ways in which these processes affect and link teacher and student feedback literacy. Data was analysed from a 14-week course aimed at developing students’ competencies in self-evaluation, peer feedback and teamwork. Results are presented and discussed according to three major areas: how teacher’s feedback on student engagement with feedback served as affective ‘meta’ scaffolding, the trajectory of students’ growth in feedback literate self-evaluation, and the relationship of feedback literacy to trajectory of growth in teamwork competencies. The paper concludes with suggestions for further, crossdisciplinarity research.

The study aims to undertake an investigation regarding the different effect of teacher vs. peer feedback on varied sections of writing proficiency among secondary students in Bologna, Italy. The research employed a structured questionnaire to a sample of 150 students in an inquiry that sought to establish the effectiveness of these feedback modalities in enhancing writing tasks. The analysis was also supported by SPSS, which helped in reaching a comprehensive understanding of the dynamics within feedback. The results provide a much more nuanced picture in which peer feedback, under certain conditions, actually has the potential to be as effective as traditional teacher feedback in facilitating writing development. More specifically, the peer feedback resulted in substantially improving the content, organization, and vocabulary to the same degree as teacher feedback, with the lone exception of grammar increase. The results point toward a peer-feedback experience that is a potentially valid addition to teacher-led revisions, provided initiatives to integrate it with feedback literacy are focused on putting student empowerment at their core. The research has therefore added to the broader discussion of feedback mechanisms in language learning by proposing a re-evaluation of the nature of peer feedback within educational paradigms.

Cho, Yunkyoung & Sohn, Taeho. (2007). Complementarity of peer and teacher feedback in Korean high school English classes. English Teaching, 62(3), 307-329. The present study is interested in examining the issue of complementarity of peer feedback and teacher feedback as employed in Korean secondary English classes. Specifically, the complementarity of the two feedback sources was examined in three respects: the nature of feedback, the incorporation of feedback into revision, and the effects of feedback on the improvement of the revised drafts. The overall findings seem to support the complementarity of the two types of feedback. First, teacher feedback was predominantly concerned with the surface level of writing, while some of the peer feedback concerned content and organization. Second, almost all of the teacher feedback was accepted or adapted in revision, while the students in the peer feedback group were selective in choosing which peer feedback to use in revisions. Lastly, the quality of the second drafts of the two groups did not significantly differ, and both the teacher and peer feedback were found to be effective in promoting revisions. Despite a few methodological limitations, these findings indicate that Korean EFL secondary learners could benefit from peer feedback in different ways from teacher feedback.

Feedback literacy, defined as the ability to reflect on and implement constructive insights provided by others, is crucial for teachers’ professional growth. This study explores how Teacher Candidates (TCs) (n = 160) in an online reading methods course valued feedback on their teaching videos from peers versus instructors, leveraging communities of practice as the theoretical framework. This study examines TCs’ preferences and rationales for feedback sources in design/development research, a unique contribution to feedback research in teacher education. Using a concurrent mixed-methods approach, we analyzed TCs’ ratings of the quality of tagged comments on videos of their classroom instruction provided by both groups, and we analyzed the reasons they provided for their ratings. Results of the independent samples t-test revealed that the TCs rated instructor feedback significantly higher than peer feedback. Thematic analysis of the qualitative data identified factors such as feedback specificity, constructive criticism, timeliness, expertise, emotional support, and practical application as central to TCs’ feedback preferences. However, TCs also recognized aspects of peer feedback they found valuable, underscoring the potential benefit of structured feedback training to improve peer feedback effectiveness. These findings highlight the need for targeted feedback literacy development to help TCs maximize the benefits of both instructor and peer feedback.

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.

Building upon Zimmerman’s socio-cognitive view of self-regulation, we explored EFL (English as a Foreign Language) students’ revision and the likely contribution to revision from three salient self-regulating sources: peer feedback, instructor feedback, and revision goals. Data was obtained from 70 Chinese EFL students in a writing class through a 300-word online writing assignment involving online instructor and peer feedback, free-response revision goals, and a required revision. We closely coded students’ revision and then used the same coding scheme to analyze the relative levels of association of revision changes with peer comments, instructor comments and revision goals. We found that: (a) the majority of revision changes have been triggered by three mediating sources, with revision goals as the most significant contributing source. Additionally, most revision changes come from a combination of two or three sources, with the overlap of peer feedback and revision goals accounting for the biggest overlapping contribution for both high and low-level revisions; (b) as for the relationship among the three sources, no significant difference was found between revision goals’ overlap rate with peer feedback and their overlap rate with instructor feedback. Instructor feedback and peer feedback did not overlap very much. Findings suggest that students could revise beyond instructor and peer feedback in their revision efforts guided by their own reflective goals, and peer feedback could function as a more productive and multiple-reader source of revision in comparison with instructor feedback. This study also provided evidence for students’ self-regulated learning of writing through the use of self-regulating resources and charted a route for how writing could be improved.

This study investigated the longer-term impacts (i.e., into the next semester) of trained peer feedback in comparison with teacher feedback on students’ writing development and writing motivation. Sections of an EFL writing course were randomly assigned to either teacher feedback or trained peer feedback conditions across two semesters. In the first semester, during their writing class, students either received training in how to implement peer feedback or simply studied models of writing (that were also used in the training work). In the second semester, students either received teacher or peer feedback across multiple assignments. Writing competence, writing self-efficacy, and writing self-regulated learning were assessed at the beginning and end of the second semester. Trained peer feedback and teacher feedback had similar positive effects on the improvement of writing competence and writing self-efficacy. However, trained peer feedback led to a significant enhancement of students’ autonomous motivation relative to no such growth from teacher feedback.

Peer assessment is a common pedagogical practice for evaluating students' writing in college English classrooms. However, in-depth research on the learning outcomes after peer assessment is scarce and inconsistent; how peer feedback is used has not been fully explored either. This study compared peer feedback to teacher feedback and explored the different features of feedback and its impact on draft revision. Two specific research questions were answered in this study: (1) In which aspects can peer feedback supplement teacher feedback in improving the linguistic features in writing? (2) What are the differences in features of peer feedback versus teacher feedback? And how do they connect to feedback take-in? Two writing tasks were assigned to 94 students. One received teacher feedback and the other peer feedback. Pre-feedback and post-feedback writings in both tasks (4 sets in total) were scored and human ratings were adjusted using Many-Facet Rasch modeling to control for differences in leniency. Drawing on three natural language processing (NLP) tools, this study also assessed writing qualities by comparing 22 selected indices related to the scoring rubrics for human raters, which involve three dimensions: cohesion, lexical quality and syntactic complexity. Peer and teacher feedback was then coded based on features of feedback to explore their influence on draft revision. The results showed that both peer and teacher feedback had positive effects on rating scores. We confirmed peer feedback as an effective classroom approach to improve writing, though limited compared to teacher feedback as reflected in the indices. In terms of feedback features, students often stopped at identifying the language problems, while the teacher provided more explanations, solutions or suggestions regarding the problems identified. Implications for peer feedback research and implementation of peer assessment activities are provided.

This classroom-based research attempted to explore whether teacher and peer feedback can be effectively implemented in an EFL writing classroom at the tertiary level. Characteristics of teacher and peer feedback, students’ use of feedback along with perceived usefulness, and complementing effects of teacher and peer feedback were analyzed. Twenty students enrolled in an academic writing course participated in the study. Students engaged in drafting, revising, and editing stages of writing under the process approach. Data gathered were essay drafts, a survey on teacher and peer feedback, and interviews. The study found that teacher and peer feedback included various categories (e.g., identification, suggestion) and areas (e.g., thesis, organization) of feedback, yet teacher feedback was more balanced than peer feedback. Students found both teacher and peer reviews helpful and recognized the benefits of each, but they favored and incorporated more of the teacher feedback. The interviews, however, revealed that most students appreciated peer feedback because they could learn new perspectives and expressions. Students also felt less obliged to accept all of peers’ comments, compared to teachers’ feedback, leading them to critically evaluate their usefulness. Active verbal interactions and in-depth trainings were suggested to make both types of feedback more meaningful.

With the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs), AI-generated feedback is gaining traction as a scalable feedback source for higher education. To qualify as viable alternatives for higher education classrooms, its relative effectiveness compared to teacher feedback and peer feedback needs to be better understood. To this end, a randomized field experiment (N = 90) compared the effects of three feedback sources—teacher, peer, and LLM—on students’ feedback perceptions and their achievement. To eliminate potential confounds, we (a) controlled for learning gains that may result from students giving feedback to their peers and (b) blinded feedback sources from feedback recipients. Results showed that students rated teacher feedback as less fair and harder to accept than peer and LLM feedback. Students receiving teacher feedback also indicated less willingness to revise their work based on the feedback. Conversely, teacher feedback produced the strongest improvements in scientific argumentation and formal quality of students’ work. Here, LLM feedback yielded the smallest improvement overall. Lastly, feedback literacy and intrinsic motivation partly moderated feedback effects on perceptions and achievement outcomes. For example, students with more productive attitudes toward feedback achieved higher argumentation quality after receiving teacher feedback than their peers. Findings indicate that the impact of feedback on both student perceptions and performance depends on the interplay between the feedback source and learner dispositions; deliberately aligning these factors could therefore amplify the benefits of feedback interventions. Future research should explore hybrid and adaptive feedback models that integrate human and AI input.

Investigating learners’ use and understanding of peer and teacher feedback on writing: A comparative study in a Chinese English writing classroom

Over the past 40 years, developments in writing studies research have emphasized the importance of both process-orientation - incorporation of scaffolding through feedback and revision - and situativity - recognizing that knowledge is best learned within the context it is to be applied. Engineering faculty, however, often view writing in ways at odds with both of these developments: treating writing as something to be taught elsewhere or integrating writing into engineering courses without incorporating feedback or revision. This mismatch is problematic, because improving engineering students’ writing is a critical problem for engineering education. Additionally, feedback is often unfeasible within the constraints of many engineering courses-instructor time and large student-faculty ratios. One potential way to address these concerns is to use peer feedback. An open question, however, is how instructor and peer feedback practices differ and how that difference impacts students' revising process. We present results of an empirical analysis of peer vs. instructor feedback on a writing assignment in a large first-year engineering course. Findings indicate that peer feedback was at least as effective as instructor feedback in terms of quality improvement and that trained peer reviewers give feedback that is more consistent with effective practices than untrained instructors.

The provision of feedback on student work has been a common and even recommended practice across levels of education throughout the years. In the field of academic writing pedagogy, giving feedback has become a crucial part of the teaching/learning process given that composition skills are quite intricate and difficult to master, requiring a cycle of continual drafting, feedback and re-drafting until a final version is produced. Teacher feedback appears to be the most utilized in current classrooms, with peer feedback beginning to be applied in many disciplines as well in recent times. Nevertheless, it appears that most research studies on the uses and the benefits of teacher and peer feedback focus on undergraduate students with graduate students’ voices less contemplated in this regard. Considering this potential research gap as well as the fact that doctoral students often are more skilled and competent writers, this study analyses these students’ attitudes and views toward the need of teacher and peer feedback in a research writing in English course delivered in a Finnish university with a mix of international and local students. The results seem to indicate that both types of feedback, but specifically a combination of both, were well-accepted and highly-regarded by these students, particularly as far as reader-friendliness is concerned.

Student feedback literacy has recently attracted considerable attention as a potential solution to the persistent issue of student disengagement in feedback processes. While prior research has explored the cognitive and affective dimensions of student feedback literacy, the behavioural dimension remains less understood. For a feedback intervention to be successful, it must influence the behavioural dimension of student feedback literacy, specifically what students do in feedback processes. This study investigates the effects of a semester-long multiple-feedback intervention, incorporating peer feedback, teacher feedback, and self-assessment, on the feedback literacy behaviour of Chinese EFL (English as a Foreign Language) writers with different English proficiency: lower-proficiency (LP) and higher-proficiency (HP). Findings reveal significant improvements in students’ feedback literacy behaviour, particularly in providing, seeking and using feedback information as well as managing affect. While both the LP and HP groups improved significantly, the LP group achieved greater overall improvement. The study contributes to existing literature by advancing our understanding of the behavioural development of feedback literacy. It suggests that emphasizing feedback literacy behaviour can significantly enhance feedback engagement and potentially lead to improved learning outcomes.

A comparative study of peer and teacher feedback in a Chinese EFL writing class