Abstract
This article explores peer review through the lens of internal feedback. It investigates the internal feedback that students generate when they compare their work with the work of peers and with comments received from peers. Inner feedback was made explicit by having students write an account of what they were learning from making these different comparisons. This allowed evaluation of the extent to which students’ self-generated feedback comments would match the feedback comments a teacher might provide, and exploration of other variables hypothesized to influence inner feedback generation. Analysis revealed that students’ self-generated feedback became more elaborate from one comparison to the next and that this, and multiple simultaneous comparisons, resulted in students’ generating feedback that not only matched the teacher’s feedback but surpassed it in powerful and productive ways. Comparisons against received peer comments added little to the feedback students had already generated from comparisons against peer works. The implications are that having students make explicit the internal feedback they generate not only helps them build their metacognitive knowledge and self-regulatory abilities but can also decrease teacher workload in providing comments.
Highlights
Giving feedback to students on their work is time consuming for academic staff and it often does not result in significant learning (Price et al 2010)
Only 10 students (24%) had to compare their essay against received peer comments to fully identify the areas for improvement noted by the teacher
Students should be asked to make multiple simultaneous comparisons as this resulted in students generating feedback of a type that even a conscientious teacher might have difficulty providing, namely, high-level feedback about where their own essay sits in relation to a set of similar essays of different quality
Summary
Giving feedback to students on their work is time consuming for academic staff and it often does not result in significant learning (Price et al 2010). Many researchers advocate peer review as an alternative to, or as a complementary method alongside, teacher comments (Nicol 2013; Mulder et al 2014: Carless and Boud 2018). Students review and provide feedback comments on the work of their peers and receive feedback comments on their own work from peers This method is seen as a means of increasing students’ engagement with feedback processes and of improving learning without increasing the teacher burden in providing comments (Mulder et al 2014; Gaynor 2020). Researchers maintain that engagement in peer review helps develop in students the capacity to evaluate and regulate their own learning (Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick 2006; Sadler 2010; Evans 2013)
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